Plenty of businesses that paid for an app don’t own the accounts it runs on, and most only find out when they need something from a supplier who has stopped replying.
When an agency or freelancer builds your app, it’s often quickest for them to publish it from their own Apple and Google developer accounts, host the backend on their own cloud account and keep the code in their own repository. Everything works, so nobody asks. Then the relationship ends, or the developer goes quiet, and the business discovers that the app with its name on it belongs, in every practical sense, to someone else.
We hear versions of this regularly. A founder whose developer took a year to build their app, then only replied when the founder chased. A start-up weeks from onboarding its first corporate customers that spent weeks chasing its developer for its own source code, and never got access to the server it ran on. More and more, new clients ask up front that every account stays in their name.
A two-minute check
Open your app on the App Store and find the Seller in the Information section. Apple displays the enrolled organisation’s name as the seller, so if it shows your developer’s company, or a person’s name that isn’t yours, the app is in their account. Google Play shows a developer name too, though the developer chooses it.
If it’s yours, check who holds the top role. On Apple that’s the Account Holder; on Google Play it’s the account owner. It should be someone inside your business, not a supplier.
Moving it is possible, but it needs the other side
Both stores have an official transfer. On Apple, the current Account Holder starts it in App Store Connect and yours accepts within 60 days; Apple says the app stays on sale and keeps its reviews and ratings, and the move can take up to two business days. On Google Play, a transfer request is approved by the receiving account and reviewed by Google within two working days, and users, ratings and subscriptions move with the app.
What neither store offers is a way to pull an app out of an account you don’t control. The current owner has to start it. So the time to sort this out is while the relationship is still working. If it has already broken down, start with your contract and, if you need to, a solicitor.
The store listing is only the visible part
The accounts that cause real trouble are the ones nobody lists: the domain your email and sign-in links depend on, the backend and database that hold your customers’ data, the code repository (with its full history, not a zip) and every third-party key the app uses, from payments to push notifications. One person in an r/startups thread about taking over apps put it neatly: “the surprise is almost never the code. it’s almost always an account nobody remembers exists.” A developer in the same thread described a client whose old developer disappeared before handing over the production database: “The client had already launched, and had to lose their first week and a half of users”.
The fix is for your business to open its own developer accounts, keep the owner role on each and give suppliers user access. They can still do everything they need, and you can’t be locked out.
If an agency built it
Read the contract first, because some agency terms only pass ownership of the code to you once the final invoice is paid. Then look at how the agency set things up. Some publish every client’s app from their own organisation account, which means an app transfer. Others work inside the client’s account with one of their staff in the top role, so only the role has to move. Ask for one named person to run the handover, because staff move on and the person who set up your push keys may have left. When it’s done, remove the agency’s users from your store accounts, repository and cloud projects. If you run an agency yourself, setting clients up in their own accounts from day one saves everyone this conversation later.
Where to start
We’ve written the full step-by-step for both stores, including the criteria that block a transfer and the order to recover everything else: Who Owns Your App? How to Move It Into Your Own Apple and Google Play Accounts. If your developer has gone quiet and you’re not sure what you own, our App Rescue service starts with a free check, then a £95 code review, credited in full if we go on to do the work, that covers who owns the code and the accounts.
Foresight Mobile is a Manchester-based mobile app development and maintenance company. We take over apps whose original developers have moved on, and making sure the client owns every account is the first thing we fix. If you’re not sure whose name your app is in, get in touch.
