Monday, June 21, 2010

Did you know this about Apple?


A while ago (when I was on vacation in Germany) a friend of mine (an attorney and developer what a unique and great combination) asked me about Apple’s developer Program for iphone.
I said that he just need to sing up, pay the $99 and then he can start to test his iphone software on his iphone.

I got yesterday from him an email that I could not believe how much Apple changed. I am almost positive that when I signed up fro the developer program I got my access instantly. He told me his funny but true story.

He signed up but got not instantly enrolled. He got worried and searched within Apple but did not find anything about how long an enrollment would take. After searching the Internet and reading posts from other developers he could make an estimated guess of 3 to 4 weeks for enrollment. But a few days later he got an activation code (hurrah) unfortunately the code did not work. Lucky wise the code came with an apple phone number. It was Friday and he did want to start with his new venture to be an apple developer. He called the office in Germany, UK and the US but all are closed over the weekend and are only open from 7am to 7pm local time. He emailed as well but no luck. I understand that offices are closed over the weekend but for such a situation should be a 24/7 hotline, he was for sure not the first person, hence apple has over 100,000 developers enrolled in 2008 (On Wednesday, the company issued a press release to announce that an astonishing 100,000 copies of the SDK had been downloaded in just four days.., March 2008). I assume it will be today over 250,000.

After a frustrating weekend, he tried it again on a Monday. Monday seems always good, but it took over 10 minutes till somebody took a call at the office in Munich, oh actually it was not the office in Munich the call got routed to UK, there they explained him he has to talk with the business department in Munich.

He got really frustrated and went into his apple account again and after searching a while he could find a notice that his identity check did not work, but funny the credit card payment worked. Did not know that people can get credit cards if they can’t proof that they are who they say they are (Note: He is in Germany, getting a credit card there is only possible through your house bank).

After days talking with Apple going through the online account the solution was easy. He just needs to fax his identity papers (singed by a notary) to the US. He does not need to send original, only fax, but email is not valid. Do they know how low the fax resolution is, that anybody could fake a notary stamp? Maybe Apple has a new fax invented, which has a 96000 dpi resolution (quadruple retina display).
In case you want to see the form you have to submit:
http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/program/identityverificationform.pdf

Here is an interesting post about this problem:
http://iphonedevex.blogspot.com/2009/04/enrolling-my-company.html

Anyway he is waiting now to get access to apple developer program, and hopefully he can soon start to develop an iphone app to get his money back. As we know Apple paid already 1 Billion to developers the best paid apps are listed here http://appshopper.com/bestsellers/paid/?device=iphone&sort=position&dir=asc

My friend told me that signing app at Microsoft or Sun is not as half as long and complicated. 

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