We are a small software company in Africa. For over two years, we've built and maintained an app. It has become a vital economic engine for our local community, employing a whole fleet of delivery agents and serving as a lifeline for local stores and restaurants.
Recently, we discovered that a single employee used a shared company machine to engage in unauthorized activities that violated Apple's Developer Terms of Service.
We took immediate action: we fired the employee on the spot and completely overhauled our security. We revoked all individual access and implemented mandatory, peer-reviewed, supervised sessions for any Apple Developer portal access.
The problem is the collateral damage. Apple terminated our entire organization's account. We submitted an appeal through App Store Connect, but we feel completely stuck behind automated walls. We have also emailed Apple executives, but are waiting in the dark.
Because of this one employee's actions, our app is facing total removal, and families in our community are quite literally losing their daily income. We aren't asking for special treatment, just a chance for a real human at App Review to look at the security steps we've taken and consider a second chance.
If anyone here has been through this, has advice, or knows how to get a human at Apple to actually read our appeal, our entire community would be forever grateful. Thank you so much for your time.
(For reference if any Apple folks are reading: our Apple Team ID is T35TM9SW45)
OP: I suggest being MUCH more transparent when asking for help.
For all we know you are running a scam center support app. Consider the outraged posts that make it to the front page, essentially complaining about how their MLM bitcoin scam has been shut down.
They can kick you out and make your software the equivalent of bricked hardware; without any means to appeal their decisions.
How hard it will be to rewrite it for the web?
If it's react native or flutter probably not that hard, you can go back online with some struggle, but it's at least a way.
Claiming you fired the party responsible isn’t very convincing, honestly, especially if it’s hard to verify: was it an alias? did the employee only exist on paper? are they still around just not “employeed”, were they a designated patsy? Nor are claims that you revamped your security, which doesn’t address the root problem of whether it was intentional behaviour or not. And what’s worse, the natural urgency and appeals to emotion that you include in your story are unfortunately widely used tactics by scammers to try to get a human to bend rules to their benefit, and reviewers are trained to treat them as such. You need hard evidence.
How can you demonstrate that you didn’t know what the employee was doing? Have you reported the employee to the police? Is there a criminal case you can point to? Simply having a bad process before could very easily have been an intentional way to avoid knowledge of wrong doing, another common tactic used by criminal orgs.
Best of luck.
I.e. all these "tech companies" that want to people to have accounts (and be heavily invested and/or dependent on them) should not be able to cancel those accounts without due process. This should be a legal requirement for them to operate at all.
Unfortunately, this is one of the risks of handing control over your future to the tyrants who run walled gardens.
While you can't undo the past, the silver lining of this experience is that it has clarified to you that Apple is an abusive, unfair, and unreasonable corporation that you should avoid doing business with.
As an immediate action, I'm sure it's not what you want to hear, but HTML5 and WASM have come a long way, and mobile web applications are increasingly converging on the capabilities of native mobile applications. While a rewrite will not be cheap or easy, ensuring you can offer service to your users without having to ask an abusive tyrant for permission ensures you are at less risk of this kind of tyranny and the disruption and harm it inflicts upon you and your users in the future.
I am sympathetic to the victims of Apple's tyranny (as well as Google's, Microsoft's, and others), and I know I can't solve the problem by myself, but I would like to help in a more material way - do you have a Bitcoin address I can send a donation to?