待翻譯：The Impossible Journey to Get an Apple Developer Account: Part 2

AI 服務暫時不可用，以下為來源正文，待恢復後補全翻譯。

Dioko blog The Impossible Journey To Get An Apple Developer Account: Part 2 Two months, multiple support calls, broken email routing, and Apple still will not take our money. Apple Developer Accounts Developer Relations 8/5/2026 · Jordan Sullivan Apple finally told us how to give them our money. It still did not work. In Part 1, we wrote about our attempts to create Apple Developer accounts for businesses whose apps we were helping launch. At the time, we were about two weeks into the process. We are now approaching two months. We still do not have the developer account. Apple Business Is Apparently the Answer After enough support calls and transfers, we finally reached someone at Apple who seemed to understand the problem. They told us that, for this use case, we should first create an Apple Business Manager account. That would allow the company to create managed Apple accounts for its employees, which could then presumably be used to enroll in the Apple Developer Program. Great. An actual path forward. Creating the Apple Business account required submitting business ownership and verification documents. We submitted everything and waited. And waited. Eventually, we called Apple to ask what was happening. It turned out Apple had sent an email requesting additional documentation. The email had gone to spam, so we never saw it. That part is not entirely Apple's fault. Spam filters happen. What was less understandable was that the Apple Business dashboard continued to say the application was pending without showing any indication that Apple was waiting for additional documents. There was no warning, outstanding task, notification, or visible request in the dashboard. From our perspective, the application was simply sitting in a queue. Once we discovered the missing email, we submitted the additional forms. After several more days, the Apple Business account was finally approved. Progress. Or so we thought. The Email Address That Is Not an Email Address Apple Business Manager gives users managed Apple accounts with usernames that look something like this: [email protected] That looks like an email address. It is not, however, an email inbox. Messages sent to it do not reach the user. It is effectively a username formatted like an email address. This distinction became important almost immediately. Using the new managed Apple account, we enrolled in the Apple Developer Program. This time, the enrollment form actually let us through. The status changed to: Your enrollment is being processed. We waited another week. Nothing happened. The account remained pending, and we received no communication explaining what Apple needed from us. So we called support again. Apple had requested more documents. Where had they sent the request? To the managed Apple account—the email-shaped username that does not receive email. Apple had created an account identifier that looked like an email address, accepted it as the contact address for a developer enrollment, and then sent a required document request to an inbox that did not exist. Fixing the Email Address Apple Gave Us There is a way inside Apple Business Manager to associate a managed Apple account with a real email address. We updated the account. That change did not immediately propagate to the Apple Developer system. We had to wait another day or two before the developer account recognized the new address. Before the change propagated, we could not even file an Apple Developer support ticket. The support form rejected the email address as invalid. To summarize: Apple gave us an account name formatted like an email address. Apple used that address for the developer enrollment. Apple sent required documents to that address. The address could not receive email. Apple's own support system then rejected the address as invalid. Once the real email address finally propagated, we were able to submit another support request. Apple confirmed that the document request had been sent to the unusable address and agreed to resend it. This time, we received it. We submitted the documents. Surely, this was the end. Three More Weeks of Waiting It has now been approximately three weeks since we submitted the requested documents. The enrollment is still pending. We called Apple again today. Their answer was that the review team is extremely backed up and they cannot provide any estimate for when the enrollment will be completed. There is apparently no escalation path, no published review timeline, and no meaningful status information beyond "pending." We have now spent nearly two months trying to create an account that costs $100 per year. We are actively trying to pay Apple. Apple will not let us. The Developer Portal Barely Works The enrollment process is not even the only problem. When attempting to log back into developer.apple.com, we regularly encounter HTTP 502 errors or infinite redirect loops. The only reliable workaround we have found is to open Chrome's developer tools and manually clear cookies for both Apple's developer domain and its federated identity domain. After deleting those cookies, we can usually attempt the login flow again. That is not a reasonable requirement for accessing a developer account. We are professional software developers. We know what cookies, federated authentication, redirect loops, and HTTP status codes are. We can inspect network requests and experiment until we find a workaround. What happens to a small business owner who cannot do that? They probably conclude that the website is broken—which it is—and give up. A person should not need browser debugging tools to log into the website required to publish an iPhone app. A Bureaucratic Dead End At every stage of this process, Apple's systems have failed to communicate what is happening: The Apple Business dashboard did not indicate that additional documents were required. A critical document request was sent to an address that could not receive email. The support form rejected the account identifier Apple itself created. Email changes took days to propagate between Apple systems. The Developer portal repeatedly entered redirect loops or returned 502 errors. The enrollment review has now taken weeks with no timeline or escalation path. Any one of these problems would be frustrating. Together, they form a process in which nearly every step requires calling Apple Support to discover information that should have been visible in the product. And every support interaction seems to reveal another disconnected system, another invisible status, or another department that cannot tell us what happens next. Please, Apple, Take Our Money We still want to build and launch iOS apps. Our clients still want to publish their apps. We still want to give Apple its $100. It should not take two months, repeated support calls, business verification documents, multiple email-address migrations, browser debugging tools, and an indefinite manual review to accomplish that. Apple became one of the most valuable companies in the world by building products that made complicated technology feel simple. This process feels like the opposite. It feels like dealing with early-2000s Microsoft: fragmented systems, opaque bureaucracy, broken authentication, and the sense that the company is now so large that no one is responsible for the complete customer experience. We hope Apple eventually becomes the company people fell in love with again. For now, our enrollment is still pending. Next step Start a project with a clear next step Some projects end at launch. Some need a stabilization period. Some need lightweight ongoing support. We define that before build so ownership is clear. Start a Project