Releasing a Bundle Identifier from free Apple Developer Account

I am currently experiencing lack of access to my previous free Apple Developer Certificates, IDs and Profiles after switching to the paid $99.00 a year Apple Developer program using the same Apple Id email address as I used for the free Apple Developer account. The same issue as other developers such as this Apple developer and this Apple Developer and this Apple Developer.


Logged into developer.apple.com -> Certificates, IDs and Profiles -> Identifiers - App IDs I click the + button to add a new App ID, I choose Explicit App ID and when I entered my Bundle Id and continue I am presented the message:


"An App ID with Identifier '' is not available. Please enter a different string."


My Bundle Id is guranteed unique, my company name, for example, is not even a real word in any dictionary in the world and it is 100% the case that I am receiving the above error message because the Bundle Id is associated with my free Apple Developer Account.


In Xcode I can verify this, at least to some degree by going to Xcode -> Preferences -> Accounts -> My Apple Id where I see two teams for my Apple Id:

  • Brian Ogden - Agent
  • Brian Ogden (Personal Team) - User


I then click "Brian Ogden (Personal Team)", which is the free account, and select the "View Details" button, the Window displays a Provisioning Profile for the free Developer Account that includes the Bundle Id that I am trying to use as a new App ID for my paid Developer Account. This Provisioning Profile expires in 6 days.


It is stated here , at the bottom of the page, by user yorktang that Apple Customer Support cannot do anything about this issue, yorktang states, after contacting Apple Support that Apple Support said, "We can't do any deleting operation for any account".


My question is this:

The free account Provisoining Profile that is associated with the Bundle Id that I want to use as an App ID for my paid account expires in 6 days, am I in the potentially lucky situation that my Bundle Id will be "released" or available again to me in 6 days, after my free account Provisioning Profile expires?

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sweetog
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Was a workaround ever found for this? I've hit the same situation where we needed to test the waters to make sure we needed an app and that it was going to suit our needs.


There's no warnings and no indication that the bundle ID ever gets submitted to Apple during the free provisioning process. Or that you would never be able to use this bundle ID again. This is a major oversight right? You can only ever use free provisioning for local testing, yet the bundle ID's are still registered with Apple and can never be re-used. It seems like there should be some very strong alarm bells ringing in XCode when filling out these fields in the context of a free provisioning profile.


Of course so now 'the best' bundle ID we could potentially use for our app is stuck on a free provisioning profile which was only used for testing for a couple of days. There's no portal to manage this and no indication that this has even happened until you actually try to step into production.

Posted by
ShaunO
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I just hit this bug too, and it's very frurstrating. When my Apple ID was added to the company team's paid membership, I didn't expect that I'd lose access to my personal team. All my old app IDs, keys and provisioning profiles are now lost to me?


I even went through the process of leaving my new team in an effort to restore access to what I had, but now I can't administer anything. It seems my "personal team" is gone, but the app ID bundles are still reserved.


There needs to be a way to migrate App IDs from the free acount (personal team) to a paid account. Or at the very least, there should be some way to release the App ID as the OP suggested.

Posted by
Magendanz
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As I spent solid five hours trying to figure this out, here are my few notes.


It is not possible to do it online BUT you CAN give the apple developer support team a call and they CAN delete your existing personal account bundle ids for you to then freely assign to another account as you please.


It took a bit of explaning and the support chap had to talk to some senior staff but ultimately got it sorted in under two hours of waiting. I left a feature request with them to make it more obvious in XCode. So fingers crossed...

Posted by
ldittel
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It's never been fixed?

Anyone have workaround now?

Posted by
benzsuankularb
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I am using XCode 11.5

I resolved this issue by first selecting the personal team in the Xcode Siging & Capabilities section and changing the Bundle Identifier to another random identifier. Then I selected the paid team and set the Bundle Identifier to the preferred Bundle Identifier. Then I used the try agian button or re-create the Bundle Identifier and it worked.
Posted by
Dipo
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Many thanks Dipo!
Posted by
Sercanfi
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I changed the bundle identifier in the free account from the preferred string to some random value. But I still can't use the preferred string as the bundle identifier in the paid account.
Posted by
app224
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Thanks Dipo, it worked.
Posted by
LL007
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