Locked Out of Apple Developer Accounts

Dave DeLong:

In the past 24 hours I’ve heard of four different developers who have been entirely locked out of their Apple Developer accounts for seemingly no reason whatsoever, with no help from support and no apparent way to escalate.

No idea what’s going on, but this for sure does not seem good.

Janie Larson:

Last year I had my developer account labeled as inactive in spite of it being paid at the time. It wouldn’t give me the option to reactivate it because it was paid in full. I eventually just let it lapse and now I don’t publish anything on Apple platforms. 😅

Jonathan Gerlach:

I’m a developer who was locked out of my developer account, btw. I can’t log in or reset my password.

Stefan Arentz:

It happened to me last year. After a bunch of one way communication it was suddenly restored. No explanation.

Previously:

• Our Changing Relationship With Apple
• 2024 Six Colors Apple Report Card
• Digital Will Sues Apple Over Developer Account Termination
• Developer Account In Limbo Due to Popularity
• Apple Accounts “Permanently” Blocked
• Student’s Developer Account Mistakenly Terminated
• Another Developer Account Nearly Terminated
• Epic Barred From “Sign in With Apple”
• Developer Accounts Nearly Terminated
• Apple to Cut Epic Off From iOS and Mac Developer Tools
• Guilherme Rambo Locked Out of Apple Developer Account
• Apple Removed Dash From the Mac App Store

Update (2025-04-10): Dave DeLong:

I’m happy to report that everyone I’ve heard about has managed to regain access to their accounts. Kudos to the folks in WWDR who helped them through the hoops to make that happen. 👏

And shame on whatever caused this to happen on the first place.

Update (2026-09-02): John Siracusa:

I’ve had to “unlock” my developer Apple ID once every 5 days on average for the past three months, and once per day for the past three days.

Each time I do it, I have to perform a delicate dance to navigate what seems to be some kind of request throttling that gives me HTTP 503 responses during the unlock process, making it impossible to complete its several steps. Then my session times out and I have to start over.

Update (2026-09-16): Isaiah Carew:

my apple dev account has been doing this about every 48 hours for the past 15 years.

i long ago gave up thinking that apple might fix this or even care about the devs stuck with this issue. i’ve met a number of people now with the same problem.

Update (2026-09-21): Adam Maxwell:

Third time I’ve “unlocked” my Apple account in as many days. All I’m trying to do this time is log in and click “Accept” on the developer TOS for the privilege of notarizing my software. Love too pay $99 for annoying security theater.

Apple Developer Account Apple ID iOS Mac Programming

3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon

---

---

---

Leave a Comment

Name

E-mail (will not be published)

Web site

Δ