How to Change iTunes Store Countries and Still Update Your App’s
Are you moving country?
Did you buy a whole heap of apps in your old countries iTunes store ?
Then you probably know the pain that many others are suffering.
Due to some crazy “un-apple” like reason you cannot update those app’s in your new country. The most frustrating thing is that iTunes will recognize when there is an update and tell you, but when you hit the update button, you get a nice screen telling you that all your apps are unto date… yet a notification badge will appear on you app’s menu bar, telling you other wise.
The most frustrating thing is that you have no idea which app needs updating.
You like most will then contact Apple support, which will then give you the silly work around of login back into your original country, changing all your credit card details and information back to exactly how they were before you moved, and then updating. Lets not even mention the fact that this may not be possible if you cancelled your old bank account.
So what do you do ?
Here is the work around (which still kinda sucks but its better than nothing)
1) Delete all your old apps from iTunes (but keep a list of those before you do that)
2) Switch your country in you iTunes account to your new country, and then make sure you are in the new country store.
3) Start re-downloading all those apps again. Don’t worry if they are paid apps, iTunes will recognize that you previously purchased them and not charge you. You will get a popup after clicking the buy icon, telling you that its free.
4) You now have all your app’s from you new country ! BUT
5) this still doesn’t seem to 100% fix the problem. For some reason some app’s fail to update. BUT
6) Updating via you iDevice does now work, so in future always update via your iPhone/Pad and then transfer those purchases back to your desktop next time you sync.
NB: make sure you keep a copy of all those original apps, just in case some of them are no available in your new place. You might not be able to easily update them but at least you can still use them.
Its beyond me that Apple can recognize that you have previously purchased an item from another country, allow you to re-download that app as many times as you like, but not update it… absolutely crazy. They need to fix this
