A diary of a pitiful developer who tried to be an iPhone developer.
Motivated by my youngest experience with Apple Inc. I decided to tell you the story how long it took to get my approval as a developer in the iPhone Developer Program.
Do you think it’s easy to become a registered iPhone developer? Hey, just pay your EUR 79 to apple and you can start right away. If you’re a lucky one whose name only contains ASCII characters this might be true… But that’s only one part of the story.
February 23, 2009
Applied for the iPhone Developer Program. Everything’s gone smooth. So I waited for an answer. Ah, did I mention that I enrolled for the Standard Invididual Program (didn’t know that since it wasn’t written there if I remember correctly, but it definitely wasn’t the registration for the big companies > 500 people).
March 2, 2009
Hey! It took only a week to send me an email that “documentation is needed for my Program enrollment”. What? Send a FAX to the states? Hello! I am living in Europe? Isn’t there anyone in Europe who can veryify my business? Anyhow: Why did they want my business credentials? Ah, in my iTunes profile I added my company name to my personal data. OK. Not so bad. I faxed the documents and waited…
March 18, 2009
Unbelievable! An answer. But not the answer I wanted to have.
Thank you for contacting the Apple Developer Connection regarding the iPhone Developer Program.
We can confirm that we have received your business documentation. However, it refers to “Helmut Schottmüller” while you enrolled as ”aurealis ”. In order for your enrollment to be considered, your enrollment information must match with the business documents. We ask that you please provide us with the relevant business documentation for ”aurealis”. In addition, please ensure that the Company address is as shown on your enrollment information.
That’s what happens when US bureaucrats check business documentations from European countries. Of course there is my personal name on the document and not the company name. In germany it is possible to own a personal business and use a company name (if the owner is written aside). I wrote another email and explained…
March 23, 2009
Please know that if it is not possible to provide the requested documentation then you have to withdraw your enrollment as a Company and instead consider enrolling as an Individual.
Hey! I enrolled as an individual. It was YOUR software that decided I have to be a company because there is a company name in my iTunes profile! And: I am the company. It’s an individual business but unfortunately the company name is not listet on the documents. So what! That’s legal in germany.
I capitulated.
Withdraw.
New individual application: Oh, see, now the ajaxified stuff is in the developer portal too. Web 2.0 everywhere. Hyper-modern. So I enrolled my application for the iPhone Developer Program again. Ha. There’s an individual application. This looks better than the application forms I had the last time. Noooo. It took me many tries since these new Apple developer pages (all written in WebObjects) usually don’t accept other characters than ISO 8859-1 (Latin1). I am a WebObjects developer myself and for years I am writting UTF-8 capable applications, so what’s the point? Unfortunately my last name (“Schottmüller”) contains a german Umlaut and my home address another one.
The first page of the application accepted my Name, on the second page when the data was redisplayed, my Name was displayed correctly but in the billing address it was wrong and shown as “Schottm?ller”. So I went back and corrected it. Nooooooo. Never do that 
After the correction, both, my name in the name field and in the billing address were wrong, now cut off, both “Schottm”. I never got back the first state where at least on field had the correct name.
Screenshot of the enrollment process
It was impossible to get my real name and my address into the system. So I wrote a new follow up to Apple support.
April 3, 2009
Thank you for contacting the Apple Developer Connection regarding the iPhone Developer Program.
Should you wish to enroll again as an Individual, please submit a new enrollment using the same Apple ID and email address with the ones used for your original enrollment. Please know that before submitting your NEW Enrollment, please clear your browser’s cookies, cache and history, ensure that it is configured to accept all cookies, quit and restart your browser. Once you have completed the new enrollment, please then contact us back with the NEW Enrollment ID so that we review the NEW application.I would advise you not to use foreign characters, as they are not recognizable from our system.
Dear Helmut Schottmller, Thank you for applying to the iPhone Developer Program. To activate, simply click on the Activation code link below.
Funny, why do they misspell my name? I did anything by the book. I entered “Helmut Schottmueller” during the whole application process. From where did they get my data? Anyway. I was lucky. I got my application. Hurray!
… Click …
Nooooooooooooo!
Screenshot: Unable to activate membership
Please know that we use technology which matches your iPhone Developer Program enrollment with the billing information for your program order. Your recent order information did not sufficiently verify your identity and your order was placed on a temporary hold. We have reviewed the issue and have removed the hold on the order. At this time, we ask that you please refer to the original activation code email that you received and click through the link once again. You should be able to now successfully activate your program.
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Tags: activate, Apple, business, characters, communication, developer, developer program, iPhone, membership