Estate planning as a Apple account holder

An Apple Account (formerly Apple ID) is one of the most comprehensive digital assets a person can hold. It encompasses iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, iCloud Mail, App Store and iTunes purchases, Apple Music, Messages in iCloud and call history, Apple Pay and Apple Cash, iCloud Keychain (passwords and passkeys), Find My, Health data, Notes, Reminders, Calendars, Safari bookmarks, Voice Memos, device backups, and Family Sharing. Apple runs a Digital Legacy program: an account holder can name one or more Legacy Contacts during life, and where none was named Apple documents a court-order route instead.

Apple offers a no-cost transfer of accounts to family members after the account holder's death.

What happens at death

The iCloud Terms, Section IV.D ("No Right of Survivorship"), provide that "your Account is non-transferable and that any rights to your Account or Content within your Account terminate upon your death," except as allowed under Digital Legacy. Digital Legacy is that exception, and Apple documents two pathways. Path A (proactive): the account holder designates one or more Legacy Contacts, each of whom receives an access key. After death, a Legacy Contact submits the access key plus a death certificate, on their own Apple device or through Apple's Digital Legacy website, and Apple reviews and verifies the request before approving access. Apple then issues a separate Legacy Contact Apple Account with its own new password — the survivor never uses the decedent's credentials, and the decedent's original Apple Account stops working. Apple itemizes what a Legacy Contact can reach: iCloud Photos, Notes, Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Messages in iCloud, call history, files in iCloud Drive, Health Data, Voice Memos, Safari bookmarks and Reading List, and anything included in an iCloud Backup. End-to-end encrypted categories such as health data and voice memos are unlocked with the access key. Four categories are excluded: purchased content such as movies, music, and books; subscriptions and in-app purchases; payment information for Apple Account or Apple Pay; and information stored in iCloud Keychain. Access runs three years from the date Apple approves the first Legacy Contact account request, after which the account is permanently deleted. Path B (reactive): with no access key, Apple states that in the U.S., Israel, and other locales a court order naming the requester as the rightful inheritor of the deceased's personal information is the route, and that only one person can request access to a deceased person's Apple Account. France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are named as jurisdictions where alternative documentation and a different process are accepted instead. Apple adds that some data reached this way may be end-to-end encrypted and that it is not able to decrypt it, in which case the requester may be prompted for a device passcode or other information. Purchased content does not pass to an heir on either path: the Media Services Terms license it rather than sell it, and Apple names it as data a Legacy Contact cannot access.

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