Since day one of the app store, there has been a persistent stream of complaints of terrible customer service to developers. Apps being rejected for reasons nobody can figure out, app reviews taking an egregiously long time, account lockouts like this.
On the one hand, when a developer account is only $99/yr and there is a strong incentive for some developers to try to get away with things, what choice do you have but to provide only automated service portals and call center employees who are powerless to fix any problem not anticipated by their scripts.
But on the other hand, there are lots of people making big bucks developing apps, and who are genuinely trying to follow the rules (even if they think some of them are dumb). Apple should have an option for these people to pay extra for real customer service.
If I made my living as a solo app developer, I wouldn't hesitate to pay any 4-figure annual price if in exchange I got siloed into a small dedicated support team so that my apps were always reviewed by one of a small number of people in order to get more consistent rejections, and reviewed in a timely manner. And I got an account manager I could call up and get weird problems like this resolved the same day - even if the resolution was sometimes unsatisfying: like being told that Apple decided Electron apps use private APIs and will all be denied until Electron fixes it, or being told that I violated the terms of my agreement by publishing details of unreleased products, and so my account has been irrevocably locked.
If I were a moderate sized company, there are many 5-figure annual prices I would pay for the same.
For many app developers, there's real money on the line. Apple should charge them real money and give them real support.
They make that as a commission for separating end users from their money, and Apple has made that a really seamless process.
But while developer support certainly is correlated with that income, it's not tied to it closely enough to make it a priority. If they were to spend an extra $20M/year on developer support, would it really lead to the extra $67M/year in app purchases needed to just break even? Whereas if they just directly charged for premium developer support, they could set the price to whatever it needed to be for that business unit to make a profit.
I weep that Apple has entrenched themselves into the tech ecosystem. They take advantage of the least educated users fear and outright lie about security and product quality.
If you actually want to convince people, it might help not to start from the assumption of them being stupid.
Walk around at a physics conference, Google office, Harvard or MIT campus, and you'll see more MacBooks than any other brand. The notion of these users universally being clueless defies logic.
To be fair, all the examples you mentioned (except Google maybe) aren’t exactly bastions or people who care about software quality. I used to work as a bioinformatician (whatever that means) at Harvard Med and the people there weren’t exactly that interested in the quality of their OS. Sure they could use ssh or whatever and code up some god awful C++ or Python, but technology wasn’t exactly a topic they were passionate about.
On the one hand, when a developer account is only $99/yr and there is a strong incentive for some developers to try to get away with things, what choice do you have but to provide only automated service portals and call center employees who are powerless to fix any problem not anticipated by their scripts.
But on the other hand, there are lots of people making big bucks developing apps, and who are genuinely trying to follow the rules (even if they think some of them are dumb). Apple should have an option for these people to pay extra for real customer service.
If I made my living as a solo app developer, I wouldn't hesitate to pay any 4-figure annual price if in exchange I got siloed into a small dedicated support team so that my apps were always reviewed by one of a small number of people in order to get more consistent rejections, and reviewed in a timely manner. And I got an account manager I could call up and get weird problems like this resolved the same day - even if the resolution was sometimes unsatisfying: like being told that Apple decided Electron apps use private APIs and will all be denied until Electron fixes it, or being told that I violated the terms of my agreement by publishing details of unreleased products, and so my account has been irrevocably locked.
If I were a moderate sized company, there are many 5-figure annual prices I would pay for the same.
For many app developers, there's real money on the line. Apple should charge them real money and give them real support.