Apple Developer Account Rant

Community
1

Apologies in advance for the rant.

What got me interested in learning to program was being part of a small start up where one of the partners learned, and build an app for us over the first lockdown.

The app was pretty great, especially considering how quickly we were able to put it together. (I provided a lot the actual info to code for the app, he built it and added his knowledge as well.)

When it was ready to test, I was asked to help with the Apple store, and needed to set up a developer account to do so. My rant is regarding how arcane the process is, and how I lost the ability to use my personal AppleID thanks to very bad documentation and direct support from Apple.

Apple advised me to use my personal AppleID, and didn’t tell me that once it was associated with a Company, it could never be used again.

Start ups being what they are, there was a falling out with another partner, and the app developer and I left. I called Apple about what to do the Developer account, and was told that once I get the remaining partner to take over being the account holder, then I could use my AppleID to set up my own (personal) account.

Having jumped through all the hoops to do that, I go to set up my personal account, and can’t find any options to do so.

I call Apple, they say I should be able to do so, but don’t want to actually help me, so send me an email explaining how instead. Of course it was useless.

I call back, admittedly at the end of my patience, and still get the run around, and have to go over it multiple times before the reps finally, after literally months of building up to this, says, sorry your AppleID can’t be used, it’s associated with this company that you are no longer even a part of.

I don’t know why, it’s not rational, but I’m pretty steamed about this. One is I don’t want my personal ID tied to some company I’m not part of, and have a bad feeling about.
Two, I’ve had that ID for oner 10 years, all my devices etc are tied to it. It’s probably not a big deal to set up a new one just to have a personal Apple Dev account, but tbh I really don’t want to, it bothers me, I feel a piece of my personal history has been stolen from me.

Oh well, had to get that off my chest. Thanks for reading.

2

Wow
Are you saying, you set up your developer account, with your personal Apple ID and now you can not use your personal Apple ID for personal use , your devices , email ?
I would like to avoid that at all cost .

sorry to hear that…

1 Like
3

Thankfully it’s not that bad, I just can’t remove it from the start up’s developer account, or use it to make my own developer account.

4

right,
If it’s out of your control, don’t give it a second thought, you can only choose if its going to upset you or not. and you can choose what to do going forward …

Best wishes
Martin

5

That’s interesting that Apple advised that.

You can use a personal account, but if you were going to make an Apple developer account for a company you should’ve made a new one, because company Apple dev accounts are different than a single person’s Apple dev account.

Which you can’t reverse now, but lesson learned :woman_shrugging:

6

100% lesson learned, but I do think the whole thing is way too shrouded in mystery.

I remember trying to figure out the best way, and realizing I was in over my head.

When I called them about setting up the account, I was specifically trying to tell them that it’s for a company, and I’m not sure how to go about it properly. At the time I knew nothing about the app publication process, and thought asking them would be the best thing to do.

1 Like
7

Oh I completely agree publishing an app takes a lot more work than you would think, and for a a business, there’s even more to go through

8

Tell me about it, I think the whole thing came up because we were an international team, with a US based corp. There were crazy issues with setting up accounts because of that.

9

Oh i believe that, it’s cause Apple handles all the tax info so all users need to do is make a payment and Apple handles how taxes are paid

1 Like
10

Jeepers, that’s an interesting read. Just goes to show that some things are totally inflexible.

1 Like
11

Right!?, I’ve set up a lot of company accounts, and they’ve never been irrevocably tied to an email. Very often they also require the restrants email to have the same corporate domain name. My private email is a gmail account I set of 24 years ago, when people never used their real names for email address, the wackier the better.

It looks like the only recourse I have is to either set up a new AppleID just for development, or change the entity name of the company associated with my AppleID. I’m going to try to do that, but thanks to Apple’s bad advice, I’ve changed the account holder to be the remaining partner in the company.

You can imagine how fun it’s going to be to try and get him to give me account holder status back.

At this point, it’s a matter of principle I guess.

12

I thought it would be good to give an update to my OP.

Since my email is connected to my former startup, I’ve been getting msgs from Apple.

I thought I’d contact them about the situation to see what the implications were for my personal account.

Well as it turns out the last two reps I talked to were totally wrong! The guy I talked to last week was super patient, got me on screen share so he could understand what was going on better. Then almost by accident, he mentioned that I could set up my own personal dev account, walked me though how to. (It’s a bit buried, but totally doable.)

Today I just got my final confirmation and have my own account with my personal email.

So I take back the rant, it was sadly, just a matter of talking to the wrong rep at the wrong time.

3 Likes
13

Awwwwhhhh, I’m glad it all got sorted, but dang :confused:

1 Like