I set up a dedicated Apple Account a little over a week ago so that I could isolate all of my developer stuff from my personal Apple Account. I jumped right in to the Apple Developer Program enrollment process, submitted my application, paid my fee, and got the acceptance email. However, started running into a bunch of weird error messages when trying to deploy my app. Figured I had done something wrong, so wiped as much as I could and started over. Then kept getting blocked when trying to log in to my Apple Account. “Apple Account has been locked and can’t be used.” Shouldn’t be a big deal to fix, I thought. Boy, was I wrong. Apple seemingly decided that my account should be locked within 24 hours of me paying my $100 enrollment fee. No reason provided, and my two submitted requests to support have simply been denied. Once again, no reason given. I figured I’d wandered into some weird corner of Apple’s system, so Googled it. Turns out there are a lot of us. Not sure how many, but swirling chatter of class action suits, months with no response, and the most common response from Apple: “Create a new account”.

I had heard all the warnings about locking my livelihood into a platform like Apple or Google, as is necessary when you’re developing for mobile, but I hadn’t run into anything or anyone that had a truly devastating experience, so wrote it off as a slightly irrational fear. But after reading all these posts from people who one day just completely lost access to their decade-old personal and/or professional Apple Accounts for no reason at all, and Apple has given them absolutely no response, justification, or apology, is really sad to see.

I found an email address posted on Reddit (as Apple’s site was useless in providing a means to get support because you can’t request support unless you have a unlocked account…) and sent something off. Here’s to hoping.