Why is the Apple Mac Developer portal down, and for how long?

You totally got me... Checked my email, Message from the forums!! And I thought... Lordy, this is IT! Nope... It's more like torture than suspense.

K T wrote:

Anyone making USD$5k/day has concierge access and wouldn't be slowed by an outage nor slumming here with the peons...

Touché

And someone is losing 5k a day, then you can afford to not worry about the outage, and IF you are losing this because you didnt renew, someone that is making that sort of $$ would definately make sure you are renewed well ahead of time, like 4 weeks before when  send over that email saying you need to renew.

So how is it your losing this much $ ?? RU paying Devs to sit around hoping the Portal will come back on line?? That just comes down to bad management . .

I think the overall mood and intention here is that this outage has put many developers out.

(I dont think anyone is loosing serious sums of money or sleep), its just an inconvinience.

Speaking for myself, Most of my apps are deployed via Ad Hoc. (Business Internal Applications).

We just had a new employee start on Monday morning, and the employee was told that they will need an iPad for their job, and that they will need to bring it in so as we could deploy our internal business software to the device.

Not being able to regenerate the deployment certificates has meant that this employee would be severely limited in what they can do out in the field.

(So much so in fact that for our business, the best solution was to lend this employee my personal iPad,

which was registered as a developer device, and which also had all the certs already built for it).

So this meant that I had to backup the contents of the device, wipe it, install our apps, and leave the device with him, in the hope that the device is returned in the same condition as it left my hands....

Again, I am not out of pocket in terms of money, its just an inconvienence.

Saying that, I think the biggest gripe with developers here is that we "feel" like we have no control over what is going on here.

There is very little factual information, just a lot of heresay from various news sources.

Some say the iAD network was hacked, some say development certs were downloaded and possibly compromised, some say only developer usernames and possibly hashed passwords were accessed.

The problem is not just the $100 developer license fee here.

I think all of us would agree the time invested in learning iOS programming, and the money spent buying and upgrading our Apple specific hardware far exceeds the $100 a year we pay for the privilege of developing apps for iOS.

The problem here is that I feel a certain amount of disrespect from Apple, in terms of the way it treats its developers some times.

In the end, I feel that as developers we are treated like a cash cow, with very little respect for what we are bringing to contribute to Apples bottom line.

Zerone_V wrote:

In the end, I feel that as developers we are treated like a cash cow, with very little respect for what we are bringing to contribute to Apples bottom line.

Not sure how long you've been involved, but this is how it's always been. Devs are down on the list of priorities...nothing new about that. It's just a simple truth. Welcome to the App Store.

You tried to speak logically, trying to attack to Apple, as the intruder has attacked the developers website, and you really was, but don't you think that intruders attack can be happened for any company or business, evengoogle?

I don't think Apple is not respecting it's developers, and in contrast, they are respecting their developers by trying to make their website stronger and more intruder-proof.

Sending email to developers and declare appoligies, is a strong reason that Apple respects it's developers.

Inconvinience can happen and it is not an unpredictable thing. Apple has brought alot of conviniences for us, when compared to others (such as Microsoft, or the like), whether we are common users or professional developers, so these kind of things are easy for us to forget. We just hope Apple gets better and better every day, and I as a developer, help them in this way.

I understand that Apple is trying to make their website stronger and more introduer proof,

but other tech companies seem to have much more respect for their developers than the current marketing tripe that is being pushed out by Apple on its current developer pageholder.

A good example is the Ubuntu forums, which also was hacked at roughly the same time.

The difference between Ubuntu and Apple here is quite obvious.

Ubunutu are trying to be open, and are keeping everyone updated as to the progress of their work.

The have included information on what actions members should take in regards to securing their logins on other services, as well as providing progress information on what they have found, and what they are doing to correct problems.

http://ubuntuforums.org/announce.html

This is what makes developers sympathise with Ubuntu, and makes developers confused and agitated with Apple.

The security breach may or may not be the same (We will probably never know with Apples current silence), but the methods used to handle the outage (In terms of PR) are chalk and cheese.

(Apple is a good example of how not to handle this sort of thing).

Zerone_V wrote:

...

A good example is the Ubuntu forums, which also was hacked at roughly the same time.

The difference between Ubuntu and Apple here is quite obvious.

Ubunutu are trying to be open, and are keeping everyone updated as to the progress of their work.

...

The difference is that nobody gives a you-know-what about Ubuntu.

Over the 6 days we cannot reach to developer resources and nobody knows about time frames, I think each business should have time frame and deadlines no matter how this work hard... I do not know why Apple cannot provide date which we can wait. So serious incident should be transparent :-) Nevetherless, I hope that Steve Jobs believe whom he gave such big company.

Would be nice, just for our peace of mind, to get some rough time frame. "Days", "Weeks", "Some time before August". You know, something. Instead of 'fishing' for any news/rumors we can find.

It's like looking at a frozen progress bar, not knowing if it's stuck or still working. (Not exactly, but you get the point).

We knew how Apple was with secrecy before we paid our $100. So why get upset about it. It doesn't serve any purpose. I don't like it any better than the rest of you but there's nothing we can do but wait. The alternative is quit developing for Apple.

Well, the basic (non-member) developers' site still says "Start developing for iOS 7 beta TODAY".

The YouTube video ios back up and very interesting. See if you can see your name there . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVzTjTplLr0

Are there any news about the site? Anyone knows, when will it be back online?

Maybe Apple made this incident in order to pospone iOS7 beta 4?

I' really starting to get annoyed.

I need to create Profiles and a new App-ID. Also, I have to create some certs for push notifications.

It might well be that Apple is working hard to get things back together, but 5 days ...

If any mid-size company would simply put a maintenance page up for 5 days, they'll start to lose customers.

<rant mode>

What's more annoying than the whole availability issue is the non-deterministic timelines that are simply forced upon us when submitting to the App Store.

If I want to announce a new release, I might have to change web support pages, have to align with marketing, have to tell my support staff and so forth.

But neither the review, nor the "Ready For Sale" point in time is really transparent.

Also, you might get rejected in App review for reasons that were perfectly fine in the last version of your App.

Just because some review was handled differently.

My problem is not the responses from App Review or the process of submitting all the Metadata before your app goes live.

The main problem is that it's has become more and more time-consuming to take care of all these things.

As I said before, the non-deterministic timelines add to all these problems.

</rant-mode>

I'm sorry, but it's really satrting to annoy me ... If I had 10.000 customers that would constantly have to pay me $100, I'd happily be more flexible and transparent.

We, as developers have no say in the T&C of the App Store, meaning the rules are all in favour of Apple.

There's no way to really complain ... a contract should benefit all parties that earn money from it ...

And the Dev Program has a contract associated with it, it's not just a "Sign up and mess around" kind of thing...

Sorry.