Saturday, March 26, 2016

Can I send an iTunes gift card to someone in another country? How about buy an app through iTunes?

No.

At least not as far as I can tell between the US and Canada. Unless you have both an Apple ID and a credit card and a billing address in the other country.

In my case I’m trying to buy Picmatic.app, a $2 app, for my father’s (Canadian Apple Store) iPad. I think the only way to do this from the US is to have someone in Canada buy an iTunes gift card (contrary to Apple’s weirdly dated online documentation this works for apps too) and send me the card number. Then I can enter the information.

I don’t think I can buy an iTunes Gift Card in the US and use that; cards are country store specific and Apple IDs are country specific (changing countries is a royal pain — yeah, DRM sucks).

Anyone know differently?

2 comments:

  1. Probably won't help you but I have done this (sort of) in reverse. You can (or at least used to be able to) establish a US iTunes account with just a gift card. I did this because my cousin gave me an absurd itunes gift card ($200!) but I live in the UK. I set up US account and switch between them as needed.

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  2. Yes, that works, though as you point out it wasn't what I needed.

    In this case I had a friend in Canada buy a Canadian gift cards and send me the number, then I entered that in my father's account.

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