Preparation…

Over at Games From Within, Noel posted a detailed account of his experiment with submitting a simple, paid application to the App Store:

One of the issues Noel ran into was with getting the contract set up for actually selling an app, not just giving it away for free. He mentions that non-US companies have to go through some extra hoops to get signed up. This immediately set off some alarms in my head and I figured I’d better deal with this right away.

I headed over to iTunes Connect this morning and started the process of getting a contract set up so that I’ll be able to sell my app. Sure enough, there’s a link on there that says if you’re selling from Canada, you need to fill out a form, print it off, and actually mail it to Apple before they’ll either: put the app on the App Store, or pay you any money from Canadian sales. It’s a form that allows Apple to collect and remit GST on your behalf.

The problem is, the last time I had to print off and mail something to Apple (when I was registering my business with them as a developer), it took nearly 6 weeks to get a response. I’m going to fill this out ASAP and express post it to California. If it takes more than 2 weeks for them to deal with this, it’ll delay my launch of the game. Not good.

Now I’ve run into further problems trying to submit my banking information so that the contract can be moved to a “processing” state. For some reason the forms aren’t letting me submit a Canadian bank transit number. However, I sent an email to the banking support address this morning and they’ve responded already, so that bodes well.

I’m really glad I subscribe to Noel’s RSS feed, or I would have been in trouble in 3 weeks time. I might still be anyway, but at least I’ve got a fighting chance of still launching on time.

Owen