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.
-
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.
-
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.
it’s impossible to delete a free trial account for AppleTv+ or Apple Music without an Apple Device
Then just throw the phone out of the window.
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
Apple: Think Different
…as long as Different is Apple, otherwise, you are dead to us, pleb.
You can download iTunes on windows still to this day. That should be able to fix it, then I would think.
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. :(
That’s what you get. Vote with your wallet and boycott the streaming, if not the whole entertainment industry.
Why? Piracy is the
ethnicallyethically correct choice.Ethnically?
Lmao, whoops.
I mean, I know we have that ongoing feud with the Ninjas, but I don’t think we need to genocide them…
Wow, is that still going? Been so I long, I had about forgotten
Why?
Piraten sind Frei
Maybe you can contact your bank and explain what’s going on, and ask that they cancel the charge. This might cause your apple account to be banned though, but I’m not 100% sure.
free
Sounds like he is wanting to get his account banned, if he can get them to charge him this seems like the way to go.
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.
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).
The Apple account situation has been a shitshow since ProTools/.Mac/iTunes/MobileMe/iCloud.
I’m stuck with a separate iCloud and iTunes account to this day because there was never an option to merge them.
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.
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/about-edpb/about-edpb/members_en
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
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.
Cancelling is probably different from deleting the account
That doesn’t make any sense. You had to sign up for an Apple ID in the first place, which means you can unsubscribe from whatever you used to sign up. This is undoubtedly user error.
I say this as a fierce critic of Apple and opaque subscription services.
Canceling the trial worked but not deleting the account. You can read in my other comment what the whole messy process looks like.
You’re right I misread, my mistake
They want to delete the account that they presumably set up just to try Apple TV+
