Enabling 2FA on your (not primary) Apple Developer Account

Apple enforced as of today 2FA on Developer Accounts, which are Apple IDs, but often not the primary accounts (as we do have a life beside working.. well, most of us). Apple also unified the iTunesConnect and Developer.Apple.com accounts to make the full process… complex

I was locked out on 2 accounts. From my personal company as I was unable to enable 2FA. I was unable to use my other account of a project of client, as the country was not set (nor 2FA), however I was not allowed to change or set the country… Fun times.

Apple is suggesting to add your Apple ID to your System Preferences → Internet Accounts and click on “Enable 2FA”. However.. this option is not visible and I think only for primary accounts.

I couldn’t find a quick solution, so I called Apple…

The solution is to…

• Logout your primary Apple ID
• Login with your Dev Apple ID
• Enable 2FA , this will also ask for a Phone number
• After verifying, this number will be a “trusted number”
• Then logout, and login again with your real primary account

Luckily, I had a spare phone at the office that I could use as logging out your primary account is not something you want to do for fun. It will remove all your local iCloud data (Contacts, Photo’s, ….) and re-sync them once you signed in again…

After enabling the 2FA on this method, a text message will be send to your phone number once you sign in on the website with you Dev Apple ID.

About the missing Country, if you have the same issue, the trick is quite similar: Login with your account as primary account on your device. Via iOS is the easiest. Then go to the App Store settings, and activate your account for the AppStore. No creditcard or payment provider will be required. 🥳

A quick write up in case you have the same issue… and want to get this fixed ASAP so you could finally submit that new version of your App 😉

Some remarks:

• On a Mac, you could use a new, temporally account instead of doing to the logout-login-enable2FA-logout-login dance.
• Kyle Seth Gray states that you can just add the Apple ID as a secondary account, but this didn’t fix the 2FA error for me. I really had to add a trusted number to get it working… No 2FA messages werd send when I just added the Apple ID account…