I’ve had worse problems even.

I hope not to have the same business problem as you had, as in Spain the situation is the same. An individual can use a business name.

I started fresh with a new Apple ID because my old one had a misspell on my name, but was as such:

I live in Canary Islands, and so, BY LAW, in the whole Europe, I’m exempt of ANY VAT, for services (and a lot of more things).

So I put my name, put the billing data (from my aunt as I it was a gift from her) and was directed to the spanish Apple Store.

It asked me for a VAT number and I put my national ID (that’s, my individual business registration code) prefixed by ES, as I used in a lot of places and no one complained.

Apple says it’s not valid, that should be validated on an european union webpage, that says I must ask for a VAT number to my government, who, don’t even know what the hell is that (well, Canary Islands burocrats are not so intelligent).

Anyway, I ignored, decided that 15€ on VAT is not so much, and continued the process.

The Apple Store then complained my postal code was invalid…. WHY!? It didnt say.
So I called them, just to hear that “Ireland laws doesnt allow selling to Canary Islands” (from when to now?, I have business with A LOT of Irish companies), that they “cannot do anything” and that “they recommend me to put a mainland Spain address”…

Well, so, I put the address of a friend for shipment.

Everything went ok, but…

I received the email with my name and… MY AUNT’S LASTNAME

HOW THE HELL THIS HAPPENED AT ALL?

I cannot publish my applications on that name….

I logged in and went to developer area, to the profile area, and clicked on change name. Put it correctly, for nothing….

My aunt’s lastname still appears as mine.

I called them, and they didn’t know why that was happening, said that they werent able to change that, but asked the system to do so… (???) that I will receive an email with the confirmation…

Ok, let’s at least activate the enrollment…
Same message, “unable to verify”, called them… closed.

Now, I’m losing my time, and my money, and I don’t ever know that.

And after all that problems, I went to Novell webpage, to buy MonoTouch SDK, and put my name, my aunt’s credit card, my ID number as VAT number, and, bought it, instantly, received the code, activated, and paid ZERO VAT, as expected from Canary Islands…

Thanks Apple, you are demonstrating why Android and Windows Mobile have more developers.

After the rejection, we complained to our partnership manager (who ignored us, because he has already publicly stated on his blog that his employment at Apple is soul sucking, and he evidently just wanted to go home to Santa Cruz and mope to some emo music, but I’ll save the details of that one for another rant), complained to somebody else at WWDR (who actually takes his job seriously and was very helpful) and resubmitted the identical binary. The re-submission was accepted without a problem.

When the Fickle Finger of Fate pokes you in the eye, all you can do is put ice on it and use the other eye.

Re Boris’s suggestion that this somehow demonstrates an “american centric” view, could you elaborate? I don’t see how that’s relevant to this story. Not that it’s not true; I just don’t see how you got there from here. But I’ll grant you arrogant and ignorant.

Our latest adventures with the App Store reviewers is detailed in my blog.