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I work for a company which has several offices in various parts of the country (USA).

The division I'm part of wants to get an Apple iOS Developer Program license.

Another division (in another office/state) already has a license.

When we go to that division they said it would be better/easier to just apply for our own license, which made sense.

When we apply to get the license we have to use our legal company name.

Apple shot us down - because the other division already has the license under the legal company name. Which also makes sense.

Apple is being Apple in that it's basically impossible to get someone on the phone to discuss what we're supposed to do here. So my guess is that what we're going to have to do is piggy-back off of the license the other division is using.

Besides sounding like a big huge hassle (coordinating with coworkers in another office/state whom you've never met) I'm not really sure what the logistics are. Are we supposed to be able to use this one license on every Mac we own across the company? (which luckily there's not that many of) Or is there a seat limit? The end goal is the App Store, but should we have gotten an Enterprise license? If so, is there any way to "upgrade" to that if the other division just got the standard one? Is someone from the other division supposed to be the "admin" of the license? Or can we all be added as users to their license?

For a large, spread out company with divisions in many different offices and states, how are you supposed to work with the iOS Developer Program?

(I asked this on SO as well, and someone recommended I ask it here, too. Let me know if this is unacceptable)

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    It’s a good question, but I have no idea!
    – Martin Marconcini
    Commented Dec 16, 2010 at 0:16

2 Answers 2

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A $99 "company" developer membership allows the administrator of the account to set up many "developer" accounts. You should get the administrator of that account (whoever set it up originally, most likely) to create accounts for each of your developers.

You might need to share the admin account for things like provisioning and app submission, but for most of your daily work, you can have your own login that shares the developer membership.

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    I don't know this for sure, but the "super-admin" (meaning the first to register) should be able to define team members, and make other people an "Agent", which allows this individual to access iTunes Connect, submit apps, set up new provisioning profiles, and I believe also add new accounts as well, etc.
    – Jason Salaz
    Commented Dec 16, 2010 at 20:50
  • There can be many admins on a team, but only one team agent. And unfortunately, only the team agent can create new app IDs. See developer.apple.com/membercenter/help.action?programType=iphone
    – Brian
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 16:29
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Since Apple has spoken that each "company" only gets one developer program, you will be forced to share or create a new company.

The initial burden of forming a wholly owned subsidiary for the purpose of establishing a legal entity is something that independent developers do for less than $500 and they get professional, but canned help.

You'll have to run this by your finance and legal teams to know how painful this will be for your company's particular situation. It's fairly simple for an individual to have an LLC or S corp fall under personal income tax and handling the filing paperwork with the state government is more of a light administrative burden. It could easily be more costly and complicated for a real corporation to set up a child company - but that's the direct route to getting your own developer account.

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