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Total tangent but: I just had a hideously bad experience trying to get something done with my developer account. It's not the first time. The IRS is easier to deal with than the app store.

If iOS is their vision of the future of personal computing, then the future of personal computing is a walled garden presided over by a bureaucracy about as functional as a badly run DMV office.

There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of terrible customer support from a company with this kind of money. Their good UX near-monopoly and success seems to be making them lax toward their developer community... much like Microsoft became.




> There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of terrible customer support from a company with this kind of money.

Given the attention given to customer experience in other areas, one assumes Apple knows how to treat their customers.

One reasonable conclusion is that they don't see developers as customers.

"Sharecropper" is probably a much closer match to what they see.


Their developer portal is horrible. It sometimes feels like it's run by a 10 people backyard shop:

- doesn't allow to use password managers because their login forms are full of terrible JavaScript making sure nothing gets pasted

- using "security questions" for account recovery which could be easily "cracked" using social engineering

- SMS based 2FA

- max password length of 32 chars

- fixed keysize of 2048/RSA for APNS certificates, 4096 will be rejected


In fairness, 10 people would probably do a great job. It's either 1 person, or far far too many people :-)


In fairness to the IRS, they're actually REALLY easy to deal with. Or they used to be, I'm not sure how the budget cuts have impacted them but I found their CS quite good.


Yeah, it's totally unfair to compare the IRS to the Apple developer program. That's low.


IME, recently, they are still really easy to deal with, but often glacially slow to act. (Which can be unnerving when there is an outstanding issue, since they periodically, automatically send out dire-sounding notices in the interim.)


I've still found them to be incredibly helpful when you get through to someone, but it can take an hour or two on hold. They're also helpful via mail correspondence, but letters seems to have a 30-45 day turnaround.




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