Apple prevents approved iPhone app from entering iTunes store "Pending Contract"
Posted by Omri on February 4th, 2009After months of building an iPhone application for a time-sensitive conference, the app was finally approved by Apple and deemed “Ready for Sale”. This was a great email to receive because it meant we’d be in the iTunes store in time for our conference. Or so we thought.
Well not so fast! Turns out there’s a mysterious other step that can completely derail acceptance into the iTunes store: “Contracts, Tax and Banking Information”. For some unknown reason a contract is still required for free applications, and although ours has all the necessary columns marked with a green check or “N/A”, the final column remains un-checked.
An email to devcontracts@apple.com resulted in no reply for a few days, and then this useless auto-reply:
Thank you for your e-mail. Contract setup can take several weeks due to the number of setups in process. However, if you have an approved app waiting to go live, your contract setup will be prioritized to get your app in the App Store as quickly as possible.
Since your setup has been pending for more than a month, your inquiry below has also been forwarded to the iTunes Finance team to see if there is something holding up this setup.
FYI – For a contract setup to be complete and cleared to sell content (we call that “In Effect”), each contract must complete 2 parts of setup:
1. Legal processing (where you click through and agree to the various agreements)
2. Banking & Tax info setup. For Paid App agreements, banking/tax info entered into systems, accounts verified, payments setup, reports generation setup etc. Though Free apps don’t require you to enter bank & tax info, our finance department still needs to complete some manual setup in our systems so your free app downloads can be tracked and reported on.
Once part 1 is complete (which it is for your contracts), you can begin delivering Apps through iTunes Connect. However, the content will not go live unless step 2 is also complete for your contract(s).
If you have a paid app agreement in process, please provide your bank and tax information in the “Contracts, Tax & Banking Information” section of iTunes Connect if you have not done so already. If you have already entered this information, your setup is pending with our Finance department.
Please note: every time new app is uploaded, the app must clear review. You can follow the status of your app review in the “Manage Your Applications” section of iTunes Connect.
Because part 2 of the contract setup and the App review are done manually, they can take several days/weeks depending on the volume of items in their queue.
Once both parts of contract setup and the App review are complete, any content that has been cleared for sale should appear in the iTunes Store. Your continued patience is greatly appreciated, and we hope to have good news for you soon.
Best regards,
The iTunes Store Legal Team1 Infinite Loop, MS:3-ITMS / Cupertino, CA 95014, USA
devcontracts@apple.com / Fax: 408-974-9105
Our conference has now ended. We’re still waiting to clear through the contract stage. What a waste of time and energy. And the most annoying part is there is no published phone number for reaching the iTunes Store Legal Team.
Yes, we could have submitted the application months ahead of time and prevented this last minute snafu, but in the world of rapid application development, and in the world of ever increasing mobile platform options, how can Apple do such a poor job?
Tags: Apple, iPhone, mobile, programming
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