In early March, disturbing information appeared on the Apple Developer Forum and in the Radug Facebook community. According to it, some iOS developers from Russia have not received their payments from Apple. The topic received a wide response thanks to the media only in mid-April.
What happened?
An unknown Estonian developer under the nickname qefkpfuhlu24hf34 at the Apple Developer Forum noted that Apple did not make the transfer in the amount of $ 12 thousand on time. He also asked a question: has anyone faced such a problem?
It immediately became clear that the problem is relevant not only for him. qefkpfuhlu24hf34 turned out to have especially many comrades in misfortune among Russian colleagues. About 10 people with the same case from Russia were registered at the forum.
Around the same time, application developers are raising a similar topic in the Russian-speaking segment of Facebook. In particular, in the Radug community, the authors of the Rocka, easy ten, and Maginary training applications mention this. In total — less than 10 teams.
In both cases, the topic was not widely used. Moreover, as it followed from further correspondence, some of them later received their payments. For example, Sergey Pakhandrin (Rocka) wrote about receiving money in early April.
How did the press react?
No one wrote about this for a long time, until the publication drew attention to the situation VC.ru . After this publication, the topic was picked up by all the leading publications. “Apple has left Russians without salaries,” Hi—Tech wrote Mail.ru . “Apple has stopped paying Russian developers of applications for iPhone and iPad,” Cnews reported. “Russian application developers have accused Apple of delaying monthly payments,” Vedomosti reported.
Inflated from scratch?
Yes and no.
On the one hand, as I noted in my publication VC.ru , for some developers, the problem is still relevant. For example, the developer Nikolay Aksenov has not yet received a single payment in 2019.
Dmitry Gushchin from Stereo 7 Studio (Steampunk Defense, Magic Quest) also admitted in a conversation with us that he had not received translations from Apple for a long time. The last payment to his company was in December. Since then, no money has been received. The company does not respond through the financial support form.
Dmitry did not tell about the amount held by the company. However, he noted that initially he thought that the situation affected only small teams, but from personal conversations he learned that “the big ones also have no payments.”
On the other hand, despite the problem, we cannot say that this is a mass story. Most of the teams we interviewed did not encounter such a situation. Moreover, it cannot be said that the story concerns exclusively Russian developers. Among those who did not receive money, for example, there are developers from the USA.
What is the real problem?
The developers themselves don’t know. They can only put forward hypotheses, which are often immediately refuted by other teams (in particular, there was a theory according to which the delays were explained by the lack of signing a new agreement).
It seems to us that the main problem now is Apple’s slow reaction. Even in the case of a system error, the company cannot react or simply respond to the request for several months. However, given the number of iOS teams – more than 500 thousand — this, unfortunately, is not surprising.
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