I'm taking over development of an app that was contracted out and is currently hosted in the store via the previous developer's account.
Is it possible to transfer the ownership of the app away from the previous developer and migrate the app into our developer/store account so we can continue with updates and customer communications?
Is a new app upload the only way to achieve this?
Many thanks!
TL;DR the original app dev would have to transfer both the dev key and the Garmin Connect account associated with the app.
Or transfer the developer key. You can change the visible name and…
Or transfer the developer key. You can change the visible name and probably the email address as well. The only problem is that this affects all the other apps that use the same developer key
Re: the submit idea page - I just call it /dev/null
TL;DR the original app dev would have to transfer both the dev key and the Garmin Connect account associated with the app.
Or transfer the developer key. You can change the visible name and probably the email address as well. The only problem is that this affects all the other apps that use the same developer key
To be clear (for anyone else reading this thread who may not be familiar with all this stuff):
- The developer key is associated with the app itself at build time (each app published by a given Garmin Connect account could hypothetically be associated with a different developer key, although that probably never happens). In practice, each developer will probably only use a single key.
- The email address is associated with each individual app (you're asked to enter it when you upload the app, and it can be edited just like the other app details). Hypothetically each app could have a unique email address associated with it.
- The developer's display name is associated with the developer's Garmin Connect account. (It can be changed but you need access to their account, of course)
- Even if you have the developer key, you still need access to the developer's GC account in order to update an existing app. I actually have two accounts (one for personal use and one for development), so I tried to re-upload an app on 1 account which already exists on the other. I got an error which said the app ID is already in use (which is pretty much what I expected.)
So the original app developer would need to transfer both the developer key and their account credentials to the new developer. And changing the developer's display name would affect all apps from that developer, regardless of which key was used to build each of those apps.
Having said all of that, it seems that the best practice for doing development contract work for CIQ would be to create a unique developer key and developer account just for the app, so it can be transferred in the future. That's obviously 20/20 hindsight tho. It also wouldn't help if the new developer wants the migrated app to appear alongside their other apps when the user clicks on their developer name in the store.
Perhaps one day, Garmin could give developers a way to transfer ownership of an app.
I wish Garmin would have an ideas site for both users and developers that would allow people to suggest ideas and vote on them (much like the current bug reports forum, except I'd also hope for it to have an improved UX). The current ideas page only allows users to submit ideas, without any transparency about whether other users have the same idea or any kind of acknowledgement from Garmin about the status of your idea.
I'm thinking of something like spotify's ideas page:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ideas/ct-p/newideas
