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Comment by newrotik | Hacker News Reader

Only tangentially related, but I have been trying to enroll for Apple's developer program for almost 3 months now.

Understanding what the problem is is essentially impossible. Going to a physical store doesn't help, calling their customer service has them telling you to go to www.apple.com/support (???), and writing for support has them rotate you through 4 different, and decreasingly useful, representatives.

The last response I got I was told the issue had to be handled by yet a different representative and it would take an "indefinite amount of time". Which may be a nice way of them saying it's never going to happen.

It really is demoralizing when you realize there is nothing you can do really, even in cases when you have done nothing wrong.

Not impressed to say the least.

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A friend and I spent a month or so building an iOS app we were hoping to release and monetize, but we're also entirely unable to get a developer account created. Corporate entity, DUNS number, American, extremely boring people, and just a generic "Error creating developer account" on the signup form. Apple's support was hopeless in helping.

We gave up and re-built it as a web app. The thing that convinced me was the realization: When was the last time you installed/used a non-game App on the app store that, by your assessment, has less than 1 million users? I looked down my list of installed apps and realized that indie apps are kinda dead anyway. And our web app has been pretty successful.

Just curious, with the web app, how has the experience been for your Apple users vis a vis the Androids? Are you seeing some reduction in expected footfall because of your web app decision?

I had similar issues, and I wish I could remember what solved it. It was something stupidly dumb like I had to log out and log back in on my phone or something. There have a couple of different edge case bugs that prevent people from signing up, and Apple customer support is useless on this.

Same here. It was something trivial with the form that I fussed around with until it worked, or maybe I didn't have iCloud enabled at all and the form didn't alert me about it.

I've had a similar problem trying to renew my Apple developer account. Had it for over 10 years. I had an email a few weeks ago telling me it could not automatically renew (same bank details that worked fine last year). Nothing I could do on their website would make it work. I got hold of someone on their online chat who directed me to the Apple developer forums.

I gave up in the end. But I will have to sort it out before I can release the Mac version of my current project.

Then don't develop for them.

People develop for other people and markets, not for Apple.

They are still working for Apple indirectly, especially if they sell through the app store.

That's a funny take. I guess Apple is going to pay my sick leave, then? Buy me the hardware I need to do my "work for them"? No? Weird, guess I'm not working for them at all in any way.

No, you're right, it's actually worse than if you worked for them. Lmao. Really the worst of all worlds. You're dead in the water with out their platform, without their grace, or with all of those things, but their incompetent auth platform.

I'm not sure what your point is, but I 100% agree with you. Apple is awful, and you have to be downright masochistic to develop for their platforms. Thinking you're their employee when you develop for their platform is laughable.

Oh, good reminder for me to watch my tone. My bad.

You could reframe that easily by saying that without Apple making the hardware and services exist, there would be nothing to run your app on. It’s a symbiotic relationship: devs need Apple and Apple needs devs.

This requires a Dun & Bradstreet DUNS ID number, which isn’t the most difficult thing in the world to obtain, but also isn’t trivial, especially if you don’t actually have any formal business documents.

Yeah, can say from recent experience this just adds _more_ steps and opportunities to ghost for a couple weeks, get another vague email, ghost for a couple weeks...took me about 3 months to get it all going.

The DUNS stuff was pretty funny. All flows related to getting an ID have a big "Are you doing Apple dev stuff?" button. It's like Apple outsourced support to them. Apple's DUNS lookup tool saw my business and the correct DUNS number, but trying to register with it got an error...eventually dissipated after a couple weeks. Same story for registering an account in the first place: it refused to register james@tld.com, where tld is a Google Workspace account, with no discernable error. Again, dissipated after 3 weeks, thankfully.

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