iTunes connect will not let me add myself as a user

@sarnold Turning your comment into an answer because it worked for me.

Two Separate Websites

Apparently for historical and organizational reasons, Apple operates their developer and app store business in a bifurcated manner.

• developer.apple.com

  The web site for all the technical resources, including documentation, WWDC videos and such.

• itunesconnect.apple.com

  This completely separate web site handles the business end:

  • Contracts, banking, payments.
  • Uploading your finished app.
  • Defining your In-App Purchase products.

Problem: Different Handling Of Accounts

The developer.apple.com site is slick in that a programmer can have a single Apple ID used to join multiple developer accounts. She may work for three different companies, and be assigned a role on each of those companies’ Developer accounts all on the same Apple ID. When she logs in to the Developer site, she is presented with a popup menu asking which of the three companies’ Developer accounts she wants to access during this work session. Nice.

The problem: in iTunesConnect, not so nice. In iTunesConnect, the "admin" person cannot assign existing Apple IDs as members with a role. Very strange. The admin is forced to create a new ID for each person being adding to the team. That means the person joining must have multiple email address. If an admin tries to add you to their iTunesConnect with an email address already used on some other company's iTunesAccount, an error message reports that email address / Apple ID is already in use. Obviously the programming team running the iTunesConnect site could use some help from the Developer site's team. ☹

Workaround: Email Address Trick

The workaround cited by sarnold involves a feature of email addresses. The spec for email servers has a feature where you can extend your email address. You can add a suffix to the first part of your email name by appending a "+" PLUS SIGN. From what I could figure out, the email software first looks for the extended name. If no such name is found, it drops the extension and looks again. If found, the shorter version of the email address is actually used.

So if the programmer Susan wants to use her email address [email protected] for a second or third iTunesAccount, she tells her client's admin person at Acme Corporation to use something like this as her email address: [email protected]. Apple will still create a needless extra Apple ID for Susan, but at least Susan does not have to bother with creating and accessing extra email accounts. The emails sent by Apple will arrive at her [email protected] address.

Susan double-checked this would work before talking to the admin person. She sent herself an email to [email protected] to make sure it arrived at the [email protected] account.

Effectively, the email servers are not fooled by the extended email address, but iTunesConnect is fooled into creating an new Apple ID using an old email account.

Basically, you can't invite other iOS devs to review your efforts seems to be the result of this policy.

I had (and have) the exact same problem... what makes me kinda like FlavorScape's suggestion ;)

What I did is something similar to sarnold's comment: I used an alternative email address ([email protected] instead of _@googlemail.com) and this actually created a new AppleID with this email address.

It works fine, but it would be so much better to just connect my actual Developer account to my client's.

The way it's like at the moment, I can not even access the developer resources and (most importantly) the provisioning center with the new Apple ID, so my client has to do create new provisioning profiles and stuff, which is pretty frustrating and complicated. Additionally, it is a pain to let him test the Apps on his own devices, because of the developer certificate is installed on my Mac, not his, and I am therefore the only one (or better, my Mac is the only computer) that can install new provisioning profiles on his devices.

Is there a better way to connect the accounts and solve these problems?

Cheers, Nils

Apple now will allow the same email address to be invited to multiple itunes connect accounts and no longer allows new emails to be added with the +. Just a word of warning to others who were doing this the original post is now out of date with Apples new policy it seems.