Critical App Transfer problems

We need to escalate this critical problem. I’m hopeful that someone from Apple can step up and help us solve this now, and it would be great if it took ownership of this issue and ensured no one else had to go through this again. Here goes another developer horror story.

Our company is moving from Spain to a new company we just incorporated in USA, and we expected to transfer our apps with the move. We initially created a new Team ID for this company, hopeful to be able to just perform an App Transfer. Unfortunately, due to iCloud entitlements, this doesn’t seem possible. It is unclear, if we removed this feature temporarily, if we would be able to continue with the process. It is unacceptable that the only way to figure this out is through trial and error.

We considered, being the same company, that maybe Apple could keep the Team ID and just perform an organization change from their side. We contacted developer support over the phone. Apparently this isn’t possible anymore as there is already a Team ID for the new company. It seems not possible to delete this team in any way to continue with the process. I even offered to “Incorporate a new Company” (!!!). It is unacceptable that it is even unclear if with a new company this would actually work or not. Trial and error again.

The only suggestion from Apple on the table, at the moment, is to start all over again. This means putting a new app in the AppStore, figuring out how to make all our current users to download our new app and migrate them there, losing all our reviews, etc... It is again unacceptable that this is even offered to developers. It feels like we built a house, put Apple lockers, and when we just have to swap keys, Apple is asking us to build a new house.

We may be a small team, but we have families and we depend on this apps to live. Starting all over again means firing people in our team.

We pay Apple 30% to step up on this specific cases. At our income level, you could say we are already paying for someone at Apple to work full time for a year on this. We are not asking for any type of “preferential treatment”, this is all bureaucracy on Apple’s part to make it work.

We would love to have a “point of contact” to help us right this wrong. Until that happens, here are a few questions:
  • If we removed iCloud entitlements, and considering we comply with the rest of the limitations, will it then be possible to perform the App Transfer? Will this be blocked because we have previously used iCloud entitlements? Will it then be possible to enable it again and resynchronize the information?

  • Is the App Transfer wizard listing all the possible issues that are blocking the transfer? Is it just showing one of them and the moment we remove it will show us something else?

  • Is there any guidance on what other companies are doing to solve this? Are there any other ways, even if more elaborate, to perform an App Transfer?

  • If transferring the app isn’t possible. Is it then possible to just modify the Company Information, Bank Accounts and all? We don’t care that the containers or naming of buckets are still for the previous domain. This seems more bureaucratic to me than technical.

Looking forward to solve this together.

Thanks
Carlos
We are facing exactly the same situation.

We have not been using iCloud for years, and in all builds within the recent year, not a single version is using iCloud, so I can say there are virtually no users using iCloud now. We removed the entitlement. Yet, it does not work either.

We are facing exactly the same situation. Have you found a solution?

I've been going through this, trying to move an app from a corporate account to a personal account. Could not transfer because it used CloudKit. First try was to just build the app on the new account - Apple rejected it as spam, probably because they figured out it was similar to the app on the corp account.

DTS said basically to delete the old app, then quickly grab the name for the new one.

For now, I've built a "premium" version of the app without CloudKit on the corp account, will try to migrate users there, then transfer that new app. I'll be back to let you know how it goes.

Critical App Transfer problems
 
 
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