Apple is a american centric company, otherwise it is not explainable that you can get a lot problems if your name does not consist solely of ASCII letters. My last name - König - contains a so called umlaut: an “ö”. Everytime apple posts a new license agreement to the developers, the developer has to accept this new license agreement if he wants to continue to develope applications for the iPhone. This agreement affects also the iTunes Connect portal. The iTunes Connect portal is the place where the developer can manage his applications which he wants to put on the app store.
And here the problem begins: if the developer accepts a new agreement in the developer portal, the status of this new agreement “should” also be updated in the iTunes Connect portal. It doesn’t, if your name does contains umlauts like my last name does. The developer portal states that I have accepted the new license agreement, the iTunes Connect portal doesn’t. The consequence is, everytime apple posts a new license agreement, I have to contact the iTunes Connect support and have to wait until they set the correct bit in their database manually. This happened to me already five or six times and it is starting to get annoying as you can think.
Now I have noticed that my application in the app store has been dropped silently, because iTunes Connect thinks, I haven’t accepted the new license agreement. I don’t even know for how long the application isn’t available in the app store anymore, because apple gave me no indication that it isn’t. It is really embarrassing for a huge company like apple, that they can’t even handle encodings correctly in their developer portal and moreover they should sent out status messages to the developer if the availability of an app in the app store changes.
It took Apple six days to resolve the problem. Now my application is available again in the app store. At least this has happened automatically.
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