Apple Purgatory

Well. My Apple Developer account has been frozen for 2 months while I’ve waited for Apple to approve my migration to a business account. I can’t launch my new app, 001, nor submit updates to any of my existing customers.

I began migrating my personal Developer Account to a business Account on July 1. This is a standard process that Apple offers. Somehow, I got caught in a manual review because Apple could not verify my work email(?) (My email is ben@bze.llc — go ahead and send me an email if you want. It’s a real, functional email.)

I’ve sent over 30 emails to apple in the past few weeks, had 6 calls with support, and gotten 0 answers. I tried emailing Tim Cook, too. Apparently that works sometimes. No luck yet.

There are a number of absurd aspects to this situation:

• Why should migrating to a business account suspend your membership benefits?

• Why should it take 2+ months to migrate an account?

• Why can’t I get any answers from Apple? It seems there is an iron curtain between the Support Team and the Operations Team.

What’s clear is that this process is entirely broken, and I have no recourse left to fix it but to speak out online.

I am probably an unfortunate edge case — most migrations do not take this long — but I’ve heard of similar timelines from other developers. However, even being an edge case should not doom me to indefinite purgatory. I’ve slipped through the Happy Path, into a deep dark pit, and no amount of screaming can get me out. How kafkaesque.

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As I’ve developed for the App Store over the past few years, I’ve become acquainted with the many ways that Apple exerts control over developers and constrains their freedom to conduct business. The policies which get media attention are often actively antagonistic — 30% fees, anti-steering, side-loading — but there are countless other barriers that emerge from mere apathy for developers, rather than explicit intent to restrict.

• Net-60 payouts for in-app purchase revenue precludes cash-flow constrained business models.

• Lengthy, manual reviews which throttle developer release cycles; Baseless app rejections are better solved by just “shutting up and complying” than by appealing.

• Opaque support systems with limited authority to actually fix things.

Apathetic friction is a consequence of working with any counterparty much larger than you are. There are horror stories about PayPal, Stripe, Amazon, Visa, etc. False positives only get resolved through escalation to a point that can’t be ignored.

Apple has done a particularly poor job managing these asymmetric relationships. From Benedict Evans:

Meanwhile, there are far too many horror stories from developers of arbitrary, capricious and simply mistaken decisions in the review process for the App Store. Regardless of its actual policies, Apple makes lots of mistakes, and allows in lots of scams. Of course, only Apple know how much this happens, and at the scale of tens of thousands of reviews per day there will always be mistakes, but a lot of loyal Apple developers are unhappy. As is often the case with complex problems, this all began with some very simple principles: “we won’t allow bad apps, we won’t let apps do things that compromise the device, and if you sell content on our platform you have to pay.” But once a few hundred thousand developers started asking what that actually meant, it turned out not to be simple at all (people working in content moderation will have pattern recognition here). My own first question, back in 2011, was that Bloomberg’s iPhone app connects to a professional subscription service that costs $2,000 a month - was Apple really asking for 30%? “Ah. We didn’t think of that.” After a decade of this, Apple’s App Store rules have become a vast inverted pyramid of weird edge cases, exceptions and rent-seeking. Why is it OK for Roblox to have a game store, but not Stadia? Why it is any safer to give your credit card to a random ecommerce app than a random game? …[T]his kind of complexity is not good for anyone, and it’s not surprising that Apple’s own reviewers make so many mistakes.

This is how we got to where we are. I will point out that Apple is in a lose-lose optics battle with developers — more lax reviews allow copycats & scams to dilute the store, and stricter reviews make it harder for legitimate developers to ship. This dynamic is an interesting contrast to Apple’s reputation as the seamless, pristine user-facing brand. Most developers I know were surprised to learn how Apple conducts business behind the curtains; they expected to be treated with the same white-glove care as end customers.

I don’t pretend to be naive about Apple’s position though; I understand, and am sympathetic to (some of), their arguments for acting this way. From Jon Gruber,

Apple’s control over the App Store gives it competitive advantages. Users have a system where they can install apps with zero worries about misconfiguration or somehow doing something wrong. That Adobe and other developers benefit least from this new scenario is not Apple’s concern. Apple first, users second, developers last — those are Apple’s priorities.

Developers are simply not a priority for Apple. The iPhone userbase is so robust that anyone would kill to develop for this platform, so why bother prioritizing them?

Ben Thompson notes, “Demand draws supply, no matter the barriers”, and he’s absolutely right — I still fully intend to develop for the App Store if I can get this resolved. The App Store is the ultimate distribution platform. Some developers rebelliously orient towards PWAs, but this is a mistake. Users want apps, not subpar webpages. (In my specific case, I’m developing an app which takes unique advantage of native SDKs, so I couldn’t do a PWA even if I wanted to.)

What Now?

Hopefully someone at Apple sees this and helps me. And hopefully they change their migration process so this never happens to anyone else again.