🍎 Apple Developer Account Enrollment fail
The difficulties I bump into while enrolling in the Apple Developer program
After the Google Developer Account saga (https://hintea.com/google-disappointing-for-the-first-time/), here comes Apple :)) 🤦.
Flawless Process up until the payment
So, the entire process was intuitive, well designed, and quite impressive especially after the bad experience with Google. Even the support interaction was fast, productive and helpful.
But only up until the payment step.
Here, things stalled.
First of all, very bad UX.
On the given payment form, I filled in my details, got a successful response, got an order acknowledgement email and said it'll pe processed in max 48hrs. That's it.
3 days later, no update, no account activation, zero feedback.
I contacted Apple Dev Support. Bonus here for quick and noiseless response. By many orders of magnitude better than Google!
Support tells me that there was an error with the payment processing. I had absolutely zero idea, Apple did not give me any kind of notification on this. None. Zero. Super bad UX.
So now starts the saga
Here we go again in another adventure.
I tried the suggestions I found online, especially from Apple forum: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/126314?page=40. None worked so far.
So now I'm waiting for some ideas from Apple Support.
The weird thing is that the Apple Payment Form doesn't include a CVV field, so there no way to provide that, and that might be a problem, I assume.
Also, in my banking app, I don't see any actual payment attempt that was rejected or anything. No trace, like it didn't ever reach the bank.
Update T +11 days
Tried various ways to input the payment card info
- Company name as holder name
- Address in various formats to try and match 1:1 with the bank registered address
Still same result, payment not processed, zero trace in the bank app, and no feedback from Apple.
I could only tell when a payment was attempted by:
- Trying to submit it again via the Apple Developer Website
- Receiving a duplicate order error messages upon submission
- Not receiving the error anymore upon submission, and yet not seeing anything on my bank statement. Meaning, I guess, that the order was processed on Apple side but without success.
I did get back an update from Apple Support though, quoting:
I have escalated your payment issue to your engineering team. Once I hear of an update, I will reach back out to you.
So I'll be waiting on that.
Update T +13 days. Great Success!
Support didn't get back to me yet... but... surprisingly I received a separate Apple email saying that there was an error while processing my order and that I should try again.
Submitted the payment info again, like so many time before, and, surprise-surprise, last night it was successfully processed; in the morning I had the confirmation emails and I could see the transaction in my banking app, even without the CVC code. And Apple Developer Account was successfully created.
One mistake though, is the invoice, which was issued under my personal name even though the registration is made under my legal entity.
I wrote to Apple support about this, and I'm hoping they'll fix the invoice as well.
