Today I was setting up a fresh OS install and noticed that in the Mac App Store, my "Purchases" list was missing many items. Only a handful of apps were listed, when it should have been dozens.
Others have had this problem, and for some people this advice has worked:
- Select Store > View My Account and sign in.
- Look for a section headed iTunes in the Cloud, with a Hidden Purchases entry, and click View Hidden Purchases.
- Click Unhide for those purchases you wish to appear in your App Store Purchases window, then click Done.
When I tried this, I didn't see anything about iTunes in the Cloud or Hidden Purchases.
Then I remembered that I've had problems before with my Developer account where I got different behaviors depending on whether I logged in with "aglee" or "aglee@mac.com" as my Apple ID. I logged out of the Mac App Store as "aglee@mac.com" and logged back in as "aglee", and all my purchases appeared again.
I'm guessing that at some point I accidentally created two separate Apple IDs, not realizing that logging in as "aglee" at mac.com was not the same as logging as "aglee@mac.com". One of these days I'll see if I can get the accounts reconciled. It's annoying having this dual identity with an identifier whose very purpose is to tie together all the ways in which I use Apple services. Bad enough that Apple gave me an unwanted me.com email address.
[UPDATE: While logged into the "wrong" account, before realizing that was the case, I clicked on an app that I already owned, expecting it would be treated as a re-download, but of course it was treated as a purchase. I contacted Apple and got a refund right away, no hassle, for the redundant purchase. I used the customer support link at the bottom of the receipt email. I asked about reconciling the two accounts and was told: "I am sorry but it's not possible to merge two or more iTunes Store accounts together."]