A story of Apple’s excruciating & outdated legal practices

From a developer’s point of view

I’m the co-founder of a small tech startup, bambuu. We make apps, prototypes and other cool web services for other companies. We’ve been developing iOS apps for quite some time now, which requires that each developer has an Apple Developer account, and the organization as a whole has an Apple Developer license. This is a story of how I tried to do two seemingly simple things as an Apple developer: Changing my developer account name, and later the company’s developer account name. It turns out this is the equivalent of a bike ride through hell with triangular wheels, and not an easy stroll in the park as I thought it would be. Therefore beware: this is more of a rant (or actually two rants squished into one article) than a story, so there’s a slight chance you might miss the jokes, and get really angry when reading this.

Round 1: Apple’s “Obvious” security reasons trumps my privacy concerns

It all started when I created my Apple Developer account, using my existing Apple ID. I quickly noticed that the name on my account was wrong, which was weird since it was directly tied with my regular Apple ID. My developer account showed me as ‘Sofie Reinhold’, which admittedly is a nice name, however my real name is ‘Jeppe Reinhold’.

When I tried to fix this from the developer site, I was sent straight to my regular Apple ID settings page, where the name was of course correctly displayed as it had always been. What the hell, it’s the exact same account?After a few days of questioning my very existence in life (was I really Sofie?), I decided to contact Apple Support.

The conversation with the support guy, let’s call him John, that followed was both amusing and saddening at the same time. It turns out that your Apple developer account takes the name you used to create the Apple ID with, and not the actual current name of the ID. I created my Apple ID over 10 years ago, and for reasons too long to explain, I used a fake girls name for my Apple ID. 10 years later I have to pay for it.

Nevertheless, I was conversing with Apple Support to fix this mess, but this is where the first problems started to appear. You see, apparently I had to attach “some kind of government issued photo ID” to verify my real name. A bit strange to me, since it’s perfectly fine to change your name on the regular Apple ID account, but “I’m no legal wizard” I thought, “there’s probably something I don’t understand”.

I had a bigger problem to attend to though; I was required to send a copy of the photo ID using a fax machine. 🤷‍ I’m sorry, I was born in ’92, in a fairly developed European country called Denmark, and I’ve NEVER seen a fax being used in real life before. I’ve seen and owned multiple fax machines sure, but no one has ever used one. Does that still happen? Maybe there’s an entire fax industry only kept alive by Apple’s meticulous security guidelines. After some convincing with emails going back and forth, John kindly wrote that “Alternatively, we can review documentation sent by email.” Phew. Saved by the bell.

So, as a sane person, following all internet privacy guidelines out there, I emailed a picture of my driver’s license, with all the sensitive information such as social security number and license number blurred out.

But no, John wasn’t happy. At all. John replied to me in the best way possible: “I understand your privacy concerns, but we can not accept incomplete IDs for obvious security concerns”. WHAT OBVIOUS SECURITY REASONS JOHN?!? Why do you explicitly need to see my driver’s license ID, it’s not like you can compare it to anything? Unless you’re running a side business selling official european documents to shady russian mobsters, there’s no reason for you to have it. I would go as far as saying that my privacy concerns are more obvious than Apple’s “obvious” security reasons.

John was kind though and offered me an alternative: I could send other documentation “such as National Identity Card, if available, or Passport.” Yeah, I’m totally gonna send a picture of my passport, without concealing any information, to a random person on the internet. That’s not dangerous at all.

John knows that passport information is worth a lot on the black market today.

I caved in, and sent a perfect picture of my driver’s license with no information concealed. Let’s all hope that John doesn’t decide to throw me under the bus to make a quick buck on the side. This marked the end of round 1, as 2 month later I received an email stating that “Name — changed from $oldUserFirstName $oldUserLastName to Jeppe Reinhold”. Thanks Applebot, nice job.