How to set up a personal Apple developer account now with an eye on transferring app ownership to a company later?
- by Rinzwind
I have two Mac applications that I wrote for my own personal use, but I'm considering polishing them up and giving selling them on the Mac App Store a try. It seemed very premature to consider what would happen if either app would become successful enough to make it possible to set up a business around it, or to sell it to another developer. That is, until I read that Apple doesn't make it easy to transfer app ownership.
I'm not sure how to best register with the Apple Developer program now to avoid any possible hassle in this respect later. From what I understand, one can really only transfer ownership of a developer account. I'm not sure about the relationship between an Apple ID and an Apple developer account.
Does this mean I should at least not use the Apple ID I'm already using for iTunes, but create a second one to use for registering as an Apple Developer? Is there any disadvantage to using separate Apple IDs like this on the same Mac (one ID for Xcode development, the other ID for iTunes/iCloud/App Store/...)? Should one go as far as having a separate Apple ID & Apple developer account per app one develops? Or is there some other solution to take into account the possibility of transferring app ownership?