Hi all. I am a sole proprietorship company with a individual Developers Apple account and a registered duns number. I would like to seek clarity on three issues. 1) Can I publish a social app with a branding on its own. 2) Can I introduce a in app purchase as an individual developer for my social app. Apple requires a company bank account and I am unsure if an individual account qualifies for this. There is some ambiguity that I am wrestling with and I see some post suggesting that Apple could potentially reject you. The condition of ‘the seller (me) doesn’t reflect the brand doesn’t match’ is throwing a huge curveball to me. 3) Moving forward when I decide to set up a legal entity (company) for this social app, how challenging will it be for me to switch all of this to a new developer company account. At this juncture I am not exploring setting up a company solely for this purpose as it is rather costly and I am merely testing water to see the reception of this app. Thank you so much for reading this!
Individual Developers account for In-App purchase
To be blunt, if you're concerned about the cost of setting up the business now, I'm not sure that you've ever actually sat down and calculated the costs of software development. :-/. Let alone the costs of hiring an accountant to fix things later.
1. No, if you don't have an actual business account, your app is going to be listed under your own name in the App Store. Apple didn't recognize the trivial entities like "doing business as" businesses when I had to deal with that part of things.
3. Do the right thing now, and organize the business at the start.
Apple requires "a registered duns number" to allow you to operate under a business rather than as an individual. If you have that you are all set. The curveball you reference is when it appears that a developer is developing an app for an established business without actually being authorized by that business - for example, an App called "Pepsi" by a developer called "Joe Smith" raises this issue. In most cases the issue is resolved on appeal by stating that you are the company or that the company has authorized the app.