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The DUNS number thing is such a disaster even for companies with it. We had a the account under a DUNS of a subsidiary but somehow they wanted us to upload veri
by cyral 1y ago
The DUNS number thing is such a disaster even for companies with it. We had a the account under a DUNS of a subsidiary but somehow they wanted us to upload verification docs for the main company, of course not matching exactly how they expect, and there is no way to change it without jumping through a bunch of hoops. Similar issues at Apple. Eventually they let us verify the account with "company letterhead" as if that proves anything (despite them insisting the letterhead needs to say dev@company.com instead of support@company.com, again proving nothing really)
For both Apple and Google it's one of those processes where the support doesn't even really seem to understand how it works (they probably don't know what automated emails are being sent, and what the dev side looks like). They would randomly close cases for "no response" immediately after they replied, ask us to upload something despite their being no way to upload it, tell us to ignore the "your account will be closed email" because it actually won't be (wrong again), etc.
DUNS own lookup page doesn't even let you look up by DUNS number (so we could figure out what company some ancient number was associated with). I bet it's because you have to pay for one of their "solutions" to do this.
- arghwhat 1y agoValidation issues happen all the time for subsidiaries when the parent company likes to own/manage things. Always fun when e.g. EV certificate validation (sigh windows update stuff) calls the parent company reception and asks for the manager listed as owner, and they just go "who?".
- geraldcombs 1y agoThe One Weird Trick I learned was to to get a company attorney to write a professional opinion letter saying that you are indeed authorized to get a cert on behalf of your company.
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoIncredible experience with this: our App Store account was from an acquired company that was no longer doing business. The Apple representative requested documentation that the no longer in use LLC was in fact, no longer in use. When I requested what documents they might think a defunct LLC was creating that would prove it was defunct, they didn't have an answer. Same as others we ended up just making a new fucking developer account. Hell of a first project as a team lead.
- BobAliceInATree 1y agoWhen I’ve closed down an LLC, I’ve received a document from the Secretary of State certifying such.
- cyral 1y agoSame issue but we actually got the account assigned to the new company, but I think the DUNS was still the old company so any time they require verification (e.g. for trader status), the account is stuck in some weird state that is halfway between two companies.
- jll29 1y agoIt seems like to Google, "customers" will only ever be anonymous data points in an A/B test. They would have gone down quickly if they hadn't "borrowed" Overture's business model of paid ads. They have no culture of valuing the customers, or (like Amazon) obsessing about what they need. Apple is at least slightly different: hardware customers and high-value employees are treated okay from what I hear, but devs are left alone. Indie developers bring both Apple and Google a lot of revenue indirectly, but they don't really have much of a lobby (maybe they should unionize/hire a lobby firm together).
- maxoakland 1y agoIndie developer lobby is a great idea
- jjeaff 1y agoProbably something more like a trade organization/association would be better. Like the Dairy Farmers Association. Which may or may not hire lobbyists.
- nativeit 1y agoIt’s not hard. Start a 501(c)3, ask for members to donate and/or pay dues, hold some annual conventions (paid for by vendors) to evangelize the broader mission(s) and recruit new members, hire lobbyists to pursue the collective interests of members, rinse/repeat.
- jjeaff 1y agoWell, it's a little more complicated than that. For example, a 501c(3) has limited abilities to lobby or otherwise engage in politics.
- GenerocUsername 1y agoYou'd think a well running A/B system would not be seeing 47% declines in a yoy basis
- 827a 1y agoYeah, DUNS numbers are super easy IME for companies to get, but its hell after that. We had some crazy problems with the App Store where our legal address with DUNS didn't match what we provided Apple, even though we had updated it with D&B, but Apple's systems weren't pulling in that update, Apple told us to talk to D&B, D&B told us to talk to Apple... we ended up literally just making a new corporation and starting from scratch.
- huxley 1y agoThe last time I dealt with that they were still updating DUNS batch data via an FTP
- CoastalCoder 1y agoIf it's secure and frequent, e.g. daily, I'd think that approach is good enough.
- shakna 1y agoFTP is not secure. And when companies say they use FTP to exchange data, they don't tend to mean SFTP. They really do mean FTP.
- ddingus 1y agoAh the specter of EDI! I first encountered Electronic Data Interchange in the early 90's. The small shop I worked for at the time had no idea and just wanted to make the parts they quoted and send them when done. The EDI request came in a box, with external modem, a paper with phone number and directions and then a smaller box with PROGRESS database software for MSDOS in side and a handful of disks containing the EDI system. Good lord that was painful! I just plowed through it and all that pain completed a check box at Honeywell, who then sent us jobs electronically! Yes, via FTP. The CAD they were sending was Computer Vision and it was a full on solid model representation! At the time we were running CAD from the early enlightenment, CADKEY 3.5 for MSDOS! Our best micro computer lacked the storage to handle the uncompressed file, which arrived on another handful of floppies that formed a multi part. Zip file, which uncompressed totaled about 40 megabytes and change! Entire systems only had 20! The CAD system failed to translate the data too. 16bit pointers lacked the range needed. They had me fetch a patch a day or two later and it took a few hours to do. 300 kilobytes of wireframe CAD, and the parts we made were basically 5 percent of that data! Crazy times!
- echelon 1y agoBoth Apple and Google need to be regulated. Their vice grip on app distribution, app defaults, search defaults, payments defaults, user credential saving defaults, messaging defaults, browser defaults, and then their brutal taxation of almost all web e-commerce and businesses is beyond the scale of whatever Standard Oil had. You cannot do business on the Internet without paying the Apple and Google toll. They control all the points of ingress and egress, and they tax everything that moves. It'd be bad enough if they were just charging money, but they also make you jump through hoops to design software their way, do unplanned upgrades to their cadence, prevent you from deploying emergency hot patches, prevent you from updating software dynamically, prevent you from knowing your own customer, etc. etc. etc. And they're happy to sell your competitors ads to outrank you for your own trademark. These companies need to lose their control over this. Web distributed apps must become the norm. You can't tell me that with sandboxing, signature scanning, and some clever heuristics, that we can't make mobile completely safe for free and open distribution.
- MatthiasPortzel 1y agoThis requirement is the result of EU regulation.
- yieldcrv 1y agoyeah for real, if you have a holding company for the one asset, the app, these stores make it a nightmare to manage some normal best practices
- eitally 1y agoThis happens to Google Cloud partners all the time, too, when there are acquisitions, mergers, or DBAs where the legal business entity changes even though the practical relationship stays the same (with the same people, same contact details, same billing/payment accounts, same contract terms, etc). It's extremely irritating.