r/iOSProgramming • u/RightAlignment • 2d ago
Question orphaned APPLICATION GROUPS
We closed our LLC in California due to the annual costs, which caused us to downgrade our apple developer account from an 'organization' back to a 'personal' account. This was fairly easy - and all of our paying subscriber customers had no problem.
However, several months later I attempted to update our app to use newer APIs, and discovered that Apple did not migrate our APPLICATION GROUPS to the personal account. These are required in our app due to our support of widgets. The absence of our APPLICATION GROUPS means that I can no longer compile my app in Xcode.
One (rather lame) suggestion is that I simply change the name of my application group - but if I understand that approach correctly, it would mean that our customers would loose their iCloud data for our app - ie, all of their accumulated history would vanish. Unacceptable.
I've filed several Feedback Assistant requests (none of which have received a reply in over 6 months), and I've contacted AppStoreConnect several times (but I keep getting the same form-letter requesting screenshots, when was the last time it happened, etc). And despite the fact that I always reply to the requests for more info, no one at Apple appears to read anything I send.
Has anyone else encountered this, and if so, did you find a way to get Apple to respond in a meaningful way?
2
u/jiunkdev 1d ago
worth separating two things before you decide: the app group and the iCloud container are different identifiers. the app group is just a shared folder on the device so the app and the widget can read the same files. anything synced to iCloud lives under the iCloud container, which has its own entry under Identifiers in the developer portal.
so if your history syncs through CloudKit (say NSPersistentCloudKitContainer), a new group name loses the local copy on each device, but a fresh empty store should re-import from the private database, as long as that iCloud container is still owned by your team. if the conversion changed your Team ID, check whether the iCloud container and the key-value store came over too, because if they didn't, renaming the group won't help and that's the thing to push Apple on.
if the history only lives in the group folder (shared defaults or a sqlite file in there), then yes, a new group means the app can't see those files anymore. for this I'd also try developer support under membership and account rather than App Store Connect, since it's an account migration issue and not an app one.
6
u/Background_Pie_5682 2d ago
Before changing the group ID, I’d ask Apple to restore the exact existing App Group identifier to the current team and confirm whether the account conversion changed your Team ID; a newly named group won’t automatically point at the old container. In the support case, include the app’s bundle ID, old/current Team IDs, exact group identifier, and the Xcode signing/provisioning error, and ask for it to be routed to Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles. I’d avoid shipping with a new group until Apple confirms the old container/data path, since switching identifiers can leave existing shared data behind.