Apple Store 4+

A critical part of the Apple experience beyond elegance in design, beyond product reliability, and beyond integrity in handling those rare occasions when support is needed, is simple thoughtfulness. The facility of use, the intuitive UI, and the ease and simplicity of discovering more and more commands effortlessly is what makes the Apple experience what it is. This is at the root of the deeply held loyalty of Apple customers.

This app is an extension of the Apple experience for purposes of buying from Apple. Nothing bad, nothing surprising, it just works as you would expect it to. Perfectly.

I unfortunately have 2 Apple IDs that I use all the time and many years later Apple provides no way to combine them. I had an Apple ID years ago with all of my iTunes purchases on it, then was able to get a free .Mac account when those came out, which became iCloud later. All my syncing goes through iCloud but my purchases go through my old Apple ID. I would absolutely love to combine them but you can’t.

Why do I bring this up? Well for some reason they built this app to sign in to your iCloud account automatically. You can’t change it, it’s just whatever iCloud is signed in to your device. The phone lets you sign in to iCloud with one account and the stores with another Apple ID but this app doesn’t care. You can’t manually sign out and sign in to another account or anything like that.

This is particularly an issue when you get a gift card. It will automatically apply the gift card when you tap on it from an email or something like that to your Apple ID used for App Store purchases on your phone. But this app isn’t tied to that. And it is nearly impossible to move gift cards too. It has caused multiple headaches, because they don’t think of any edge cases (or don’t care).

I know this is hard to believe, but it’s been confirmed by Apple store employees and base cybersecurity. In March 2020 I called Apple support official number. I was speaking to an employee who apparently was located in Kashgar. Long story short, don’t EVER thing your iPhone can’t be hacked. There are “Bad Apple “ employees (word used by supervisors at Apple stores) that have full access to your phone while on phone with them. This employee READ all my text , no not the read receipts, hacked into all my social media, hacked into all my emails, stole all my emails from yahoo email dated back to 1990s including tax information. We finally recovered that email which is how we know they stole all my emails. 2 gmails accounts can’t be recovered. They zapped all my phone logs, and changed settings on my phone (with broken English)to Do not disturb. Some of my pictures are literally tagged in Kashgar. Trust me it’s been a nightmare. Don’t call Apple customer service unless it’s dire. You never know what country you’re talking with. They have a translator just like all iPhones have. Whatever language you registered your phone with, they know. Watch out for “Bad Apples’. iPhones can be hacked!!!!!