Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Transferring and Deleting Apps

You move apps out of your organization’s catalog of apps by transferring an app to another organization or by deleting the app. You want to transfer an app when you’ve sold the app to another developer or you want to move it to another iTunes Connect organization. You want to delete an app when you’re ready to retire an app and there’s no chance you will want to offer it for sale or download in the future.
You can transfer the ownership of an app to another developer without removing the app from the store. The app retains its reviews and ratings during and after the transfer, and users continue to have access to future updates. There’s no limit to the number of apps you can transfer, but each app needs to be transferred individually.
All transfers and deletions are performed by the team agent. To learn more about a team agent’s function, see “What Is a Team Agent?.”

Criteria for Transferring an App

Before you transfer an app to another developer, ensure you’ve met the following criteria:
  • Make sure your accounts aren’t in a pending or changing state.
    For example, make sure your account or your recipient’s account have agreed to any contract amendments that wait for approval and that any iAd App Network-related account information is up to date. See “Viewing Contracts and Contract Status.”
  • Make sure the app uses only technology and content that can be transferred.
    • No version of the app can use an iCloud entitlement.
    • No version of the app can use a Passbook entitlement.
    • The app can’t offer (or have previously offered) In-App Purchase subscriptions: auto-renewable, free, or non-renewing.
  • Make sure the app and any In-App Purchase products it offers have a status that supports transfers.
    The app status can be one of the following, assuming that there is at least one approved version of the app:
    ../Art/status_green_2x.png Ready for Sale
    ../Art/status_yellow_2x.png Pending Contract
    ../Art/status_yellow_2x.png Prepare for Upload
    ../Art/status_red_2x.png Developer Removed From Sale
    ../Art/status_red_2x.png Invalid Binary
    ../Art/status_red_2x.png Developer Rejected
    ../Art/status_red_2x.png Rejected
    In-App Purchase products can have one of the following statuses:
    ../Art/status_green_2x.png Approved
    ../Art/status_yellow_2x.png Ready to Submit
    ../Art/status_red_2x.png Developer Removed From Sale
    ../Art/status_red_2x.png Rejected
  • Make sure that In-App Purchase product IDs on the app aren’t the same product IDs on any apps in the recipient’s account.

Transferring an App

You’ll need the team agent for the receiving organization to provide the team agent’s Apple ID and team ID. Recipients can find their Team ID in Member Center.
The team agent is the only one who can transfer an app.
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To initiate an app transfer
During the time it takes Apple to perform the transfer, the app stays in its previous status, with the Pending App Transfer status added. You can change the price of the app during this time.
The transfer must be accepted by the recipient organization within 60 days. When the recipient team agent signs in to iTunes Connect, a notice appears indicating that an app is ready to be transferred.
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To accept an app transfer
It can take up to two business days for the app transfer to complete, during which the app status is listed as Processing App Transfer. While the app is in the transfer state, the following actions apply:
  • All app metadata, rights, and pricing are locked down on the transferor side and no In-App Purchase edits can be made.
  • Any open communications in the Resolution Center are closed out.
  • If the app is part of a Game Center group, no changes can be made to the group on the recipient side.
After the transfer is complete, the app is now owned by the app transfer recipient. It no longer appears in the the transferor’s iTunes Connect account.

What Happens During and After an App Transfer

After an app is transferred, its associated App ID is also transferred to the recipient’s Member Center account. If the transferor’s App ID was a wildcard App ID, it’s converted to an explicit App ID that exactly matches the app’s bundle ID. Associated client SSL certificates for push notifications aren’t transferred. If the app uses Apple Push Notifications service (APNs), the recipient needs to create a client SSL certificate using Member Center to reenable it.
For games, several actions take place depending on whether the app was associated with any other apps. Apps that are part of a cross-app Multiplayer Compatibility Matrix are no longer compatible or appear in the other app’s matrix.
Apps that are part of a Game Center group are removed from the group during the transfer. After the transfer, all leaderboards and achievements revert back to their original status. Leaderboards that were originally a group leaderboard retain the grp. prefix in their identifier.
Leaderboards that were originally single leaderboards but were merged into a group lose the grp. prefix. They also revert back to the original leaderboard IDs they had before the merge. Make sure you update the app binary with the new leaderboard IDs so that scores are posted correctly.

Deleting an App

If you’ve created an app in iTunes Connect that you no longer need to manage, you can delete it from iTunes Connect.
Apps can’t be deleted if they are part of a Game Center group or currently displayed on a store. You’ll want to remove the app from sale or from the group if you want to delete it. See “Removing an App from Sale” or “Removing an App from a Group” in Game Center Configuration Guide for iTunes Connect. Apps that have not been approved yet can’t be deleted; instead, reject the app. See “Rejecting Your Binary.”
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To delete an app from the store and iTunes Connect

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