UNEXPLAINABLE 3 MONTHS TAKING TECHNICAL ISSUE DEV ACCOUNT

And I must say i feel something fishy is going on…

Even getting this request understood and processed took approximately 1.5–2 weeks.

That sounds about right. I recently changed my address and that was a far more difficult challenge than I had anticipated. It took about two weeks to get that resolved. The final address still isn't right, but it's close enough. I'm not going to fight over one comma. And this happened before AI slop hit.

We have also involved experienced developers who have previously worked with Apple Developer accounts at established international companies, and this situation is highly unusual compared with their previous experience.

But you just said that you were a new company, not an established international company. When I first setup my account back in 2015, it took Apple 4 months to fill out a single page form for Canada Revenue Agency. I can't imagine anything would be easier or faster today with the App Store several times larger, with so much more global fraud, and now AI slop.

I am not looking for preferential treatment. I am simply asking Apple to investigate why an application that has already been accepted cannot proceed through the enrollment process, and to provide a clear explanation and resolution.

It certainly sounds like Apple was doing that. But then you cancelled the entire process and started over. How do you know they weren't doing a lot of work trying to figure it out only to see you cancel the process? And now you're asking them to do it all over again.

You also haven't said what "the technical issue" is. I don't want you to post details. There's probably a good reason you didn't explain it at first.

But I have to be honest with you. I do regularly see people post these kinds of queries here in the forums, omitting some important detail, and then later follow up with the missing information. In every case, that one detail makes me think, "Oh yeah, that's really suspicious".

Please treat this as a formal complaint and escalation request and provide me with a reference/case number for this complaint.

This is the developer forum. The original idea was to be a place where developers could ask technical, coding-level questions. That's now really rare. Virtually all questions are now app review or enrolment questions that are impossible to answer.

I sincerely hope this matter can now be escalated to someone who has the authority and technical access necessary to investigate and resolve it ASAP.

That would be Developer Support. I recognize that it's now standard practice to also ask here. I don't know if it helps. Good luck!

Thank you for sharing your experience and your perspective.

However, my situation is quite different from what you experienced.

In my case, my application has already been reviewed and accepted. I received an email from Apple confirming that I could proceed and finalize my Apple Developer Program enrollment by signing the agreements and paying the annual $99 membership fee.

The problem is that when I click the link Apple provided to complete those final steps, I am not taken to the agreement/payment page. Instead, I am still stuck on the very first page of the application process the same page I saw when I initially submitted my documents:

“Thank you for your submission. We’ll get back to you soon.”

To explain it from another perspective: imagine receiving the keys to your apartment, being told that everything has been approved and that you can move in, but the key only opens the public entrance of the building and not the door to your actual apartment.

The initial review itself was relatively fast approximately a week. The problem is not the review. The problem is resolving this technical/operational issue, which has now taken approximately three months.

I have contacted Apple Support and Developer Support numerous times. After many calls and long waiting times, I have unfortunately reached the point where it seems that the representatives I speak with simply cannot resolve the issue because it is apparently being handled by an internal Operations department that they cannot directly access or escalate.

After waiting for a substantial period, I eventually said: Why don’t we simply withdraw my application and let me apply again? Perhaps the technical issue would disappear and, after being reviewed again, I would be taken to the correct agreement and payment page.

I did exactly that.

To my surprise, my new application was accepted as well and the exact same technical issue occurred again.

That is the part I genuinely struggle to understand.

I am not accusing individual Apple Support employees of bad intentions. I appreciate that many of the representatives I spoke with genuinely tried to help. But after three months, two accepted applications, numerous support interactions and the exact same technical blockage occurring twice, I think it is completely reasonable to ask what is actually happening on the operational side.

If my application has been reviewed and approved, why can Apple not simply provide the agreement or a working link that allows me to sign it and complete the $99 payment?

At this point, I don’t need another explanation telling me to be patient. I need someone with the appropriate access to investigate the actual technical/operational blockage and resolve it.

This is also affecting our business. We have a team, investors and applications being developed around our planned App Store presence. The App Store is a fast-moving market, and being unable to even complete the final enrollment/payment step for three months makes it extremely difficult to maintain momentum.

I have all the documentation, acceptance emails, screenshots and support case information to substantiate everything I am saying.

So I sincerely hope someone from Apple Developer Support or the relevant Operations team eventually sees this and can explain what is happening and, more importantly, fix the issue.

I have been patient for three months. At this point, I simply want to be able to sign the agreement, pay the $99 membership fee and get my Developer account activated.

If this cannot be resolved through the normal support channels, I will unfortunately have to consider other formal avenues to understand why an accepted application has remained technically blocked for this long.

I don’t need another explanation telling me to be patient. I need someone with the appropriate access to investigate the actual technical/operational blockage and resolve it.

This is the developer forum on the internet. You aren't asking "someone with the appropriate access", you're asking randos surfing the web while drinking their morning coffee.

Such people can help with your technical questions, but since they aren't Apple employees, they can't look at your internal documents nor can they do anything to move the process forward.

Asking said coffee-swilling randos a second time isn't going to be any more effective than the first time you asked them.