My team and I have an app which we're going to be submitting to the store pretty soon, but we know that we'll be selling the app to another company in the near future. Does anyone have any experience with moving an app's ownership to another account?
Specifically, when I sell an app to another company...
From what I understand, this can be done, but it requires manual intervention by the iTunes Store team, can take months to go through, and may involve some periods when your app is not on sale under either account. If you know who your customer is going to be, just put it under their account to begin with. If not, remember for the future that flipping apps is not an easy thing to do, and adjust your business model accordingly.
As ownership transfer is currently not-supported and an "exception process", it makes sense not to count on it as your mode of operation.
The big problem you're facing is: the app is tied to a developer account and you want to keep YOUR developer account after you transfer the app.
Hence, why not set up a NEW developer account, the sole purpose of which is to be the holder of this one app and, when you sell the app, you can just transfer the developer-account credentials to the new owner.
At that point, they can update the name, address, company name, bank info, etc.
Of course, your transfer contract will have some verbiage explaining how, in the interim, any moneys you get from Apple will be fwded to the new owner (put a time limit -- like 90 days -- on this so they don't take forever to update the info.)
I've not tried this, but it seems like a viable solution. Again, the problem is that the app is tied to developer account and you don't want to transfer yours. Hence, this Just Makes Sense™.
Recent update from iTunes Connect:
I sold my app to another developer and can no longer distribute it on the App Store. Can I transfer the app to the new developer's iTunes Connect account?
No, you can’t transfer the app to another developer account on iTunes Connect. To add the app to another account, remove the app from the current account and upload it to the new iTunes Connect account.
Note that uploading the app to a new iTunes Connect account will disable current customers from receiving automatic and free updates of your application. All customer reviews, rating, and ranking information will be reset. You will not be able to reuse the app name and SKU in the old account. If you have uploaded a binary or used the app with the iAd Network, your Bundle ID will not be reusable either.
As far as I know there is no way to transfer apps to a different user/company. I think the app should be in your customers account from the beginning. Otherwise you probably have payment problems too (people paying you instead of your customer).
Why not just sell the app to a customer before releasing it. If they want to see it running before it is released, just sent them a version built with an ad-hoc certificate.
The are additional considerations:
If you just can switch ownership of the Application behind the scenes, thus changing the contract, but not the application itself, you might be fine.
But if you're just going to transfer your source code, the future owner of the app will have to sign it with his own certificate, which will basically render the app as a "new" one.
Users will lose their settings (if your app did some configuration persistence) and they'll lose the app history in the appstore (ranking, etc.).
