TIL it's impossible to delete a free trial account for AppleTv+ or Apple Music without an Apple Device
2 years ago by Peter_Arbeitsloser to c/mildlyinfuriating
So I struggled to delete a free Apple TV+ account for a day now (tried different browsers etc) and decided to search if anyone else has had the same problem. Turns out this issue is at least a year old, is known by apple and the Apple support suggests to find someone else with an Apple device to help you out.
Just wow. This can't be legal by EU law.
I tried to sign up for an Apple TV free trial without an Apple device. It let me create the account, but then I had to "activate" the account, and I couldn't do it on any of my devices (android, windows, the TV that gave me the free trial). I talked to tier 1 and tier 2 support, they couldn't get it working either.
Then it gets even more ridiculous. The tier 2 agent asks me to upload screenshots of the errors I was getting for the tier 3 (?) engineers to review. Oh, I need an active Apple account to upload anything. I emailed the images and their email system stripped the attachments from the email. Tier 3 closed the ticket and banned my account. I talked to Tier 2 again and all they could do was put in a ticket to request I be unbanned...it was denied.
Finally, I gave up and asked them to delete my account. They said my account can only be deleted if I log in and use the delete account function. I pointed out how that was not possible and they said there was no other option. The whole situation reinforced my plan to never buy an Apple product.
Lol that's madness.
Using the apple ecosystem, that was your first error. Try the Apple store
I'm trying really, really, really hard to not go back to streaming piracy, you know. :(
Why? Piracy is the ethnically ethically correct choice.
Ethnically?
Lmao, whoops.
Why?
Piraten sind Frei
Sail the high seas!
It's pretty common for free trials to require a credit/debit card to automatically charge you once it's time to renew. Normally you should be able to cancel it before the charge or get a refund shortly after, but some companies don't make this an easy process.
It 100% will cause your apple account to get banned.
There was a fraudulent charge on my card once to iTunes, so I got it reversed by the bank, because it was fraud.
This banned my account and I had to go to apple support when months later I discovered my account was banned. They give you one chance.
So yeah, you gotta ask them first if you don't wanna get banned. But you should basically say, cancel my subscription, please and thank you, I'm not required to use your device to do so if you let me sign up without a device.
I suspect in multiple countries they would have to comply under consumer law, and I know for a fact they would be obligated to on Australia.
call support and threaten them with bank chargebacks. They either will cancel you or you now can call your bank and tell them they won’t cancel you so you can do a chargeback. They will definitely cancel you after that.
report your Cc as stolen/lost and get a new one issued.
Probably don't do that second one. That is technically fraud. What you could do is, if you're bank or CC company have the service, use a virtual card number to sign up for the service and delete it when you want to leave.
Wouldn't it only be fraud if you tried to chargeback something? Just ask for a new card with new numbers.
I finally cancelled an apple TV account - Lasso was done, silo wasn't enough and the browser performance was absolute shit - and it took me THREE TRIES over as many days. I'm a 30-year I.T guy raised from the time where we'd "get games with no instructions" and have to figure it out and cope with stupid a lot.
I failed. Twice. After wasting a lot of time each time.
It's entirely circular. God help the poor schmuck who still has a device on an apple ID no longer in possession and needs to navigate all that with apple insisting "Joe in New Hampshire needs to approve your password change from that phone you ebayed 6 years ago and is probably in a landfill now".
Have patience. And, win or lose, tell fucking everyone. If anyone tells you "just go buy some iphone and hook it up" you have my permission to borrow their device and smash it in the process by accident.
The last time I used my apple ID was to sync my iPod in like 2008 ish. I actually tried to apply for a job at Apple a while back. You need your Apple ID to apply to work there too. I spent a while trying to recover it when eventually, I just decided I guess I don't need to work there.
I have an ancient macbook Air I inherited from work. 4 GB of RAM, no longer viable battery. But damned if It isn't still good enough to recover an Apple account.
I don't have to do it very often but waiting a week for their sit on it to reset it bullshit is old and broke
Canceling the trial should be possible without an Apple device.
But deleting the account… I bet Apple refuses to do that for you over the phone due to possible social engineering issues. But that’s just a suspicion.
Correct, canceling the trial worked on the Apple TV page, but deleting the account does not work (see my other comment that describes the whole process).
ISPs used to provide usenet access for free back in the day.
It's a distributed federated system in which content is exchanged between different news servers. Clients connect to particular news server which has to be hosted somewhere (and have a lot of storage space) which isn't free to operate.
Torrents forgo all that and have clients directly connect to one another.
Usenet really wasn't designed for file sharing. It's a message board system, but you can easily encode binary data as ASCII text and wham bam now you're sharing media.
Damn what's the process for this
You also can't activate an apple card or airtags without an iPhone. Welcome to the apple ecosystem. Enter once, forced to stay forever.
I don't disagree. I was just stating a fact.
Do you mean cancel the subscription before it's up? You should be able to do it in the Windows Apple Music or Apple TV apps under your account settings (it's listed under subscriptions); I just did it the other month.
Warning; if you cancel your trial it ends immediately, not at the end of the term, so I just set a to do reminder for the day before.
I subscribed Apple Tv+ (free 7 day trial). I just needed to provide my personal data, email address and PayPal data. When I decided to cancel I could cancel the subscription on the Apple TV+ page, but when I wanted to delete the apple account in itself, I was forwarded to accounts.apple.com where I was asked to login first. When I tried this, I needed to enter my 2FA that I got by email and then I had to enter my mobile phone number for another 2FA. After that the screen that you can see in the reddit post comes up and I cannot proceed past it. I tried this process dozens of times with different browsers and configurations to no avail.
... I now sent in a GDPR account deletion request.
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/...
Find your data protection agency and send in a violation, please! Let's see what happens :)
I just did this 2 days ago. Worked fine from my non apple web browser. And yeah they definitely let you know that the trial ends immediately if cancelled. I got a 3 month trial and I always sign up and cancel it, but apple, paramount+, and i wanna say either fubu or sling do this immediate cancel of the free trial so I have to setup calender invites.
I did this a couple years ago so I could binge the dino doc. I think I needed to go to the Apple TV site on a desktop to get the subscription settings. It might have changed since then
You can download iTunes on windows still to this day. That should be able to fix it, then I would think.
"you can give yourself cancer as a step to solve your problem"
At least it doesn’t require you to buy another Apple device. You don’t have to keep it installed my dude.
If you've ever installed iTunes, you're aware that the uninstaller leaves tons of shit behind. Back in the hayday it'd require three seperate programs (iTunes, quicktime, and a software updater), which all needed to be uninstalled individually, and all left traces on the system. Ew.
Like yeah it's a method, but it'd be faster and easier to just let it charge you and then file a chargeback to get the account nuked.
yeah apple accounts at some point became impossible without an apple device.
I had the opposite problem and couldn't cancel without an apple device. Deleting the account was easier.
Funny...I've signed up for ATV+ twice using free trials and I've had no issue cancelling either time. No Apple devices in my house.
Canceling the trial worked but not deleting the account. You can read in my other comment what the whole messy process looks like.
They want to delete the account that they presumably set up just to try Apple TV+
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