I want to “sign” FINAL|FINAL so that people can install it without having to enter some obscure command in their app’s terminal. (Otherwise the computer tells them it is “malware!”) That means enrolling in Apple’s Developer Program at a cost of $100 a year. I’m happy to pay the money, but Apple made it very difficult. It kept giving me error messages. I must have tried about a hundred different ways, and given up twice, before finally suceeding. Apple support was not helpful at all, but this blog post explained the issue:
TLDR: If you are trying to enroll into Apple Developer Program and encountering the “We are unable to process your request. An unknown error occurred.” issue, make sure that the phone number you provided while creating your Apple ID matches the region of your Apple ID. This is the most common cause of the issue. If you are still facing issues, check for pending agreements, verify your address information, disable VPN, or contact Apple Developer Support for help.
Actually, that isn’t even quite correct. I used my Taiwanese phone number, even though I was enrolling in the US, and that worked fine. (It seems I did not previously have a phone number associated with the account.)
Just to be clear, this is NOT what the error messages I was seeing told me. They said the documents I submitted (i.e. my passport) was not valid. That was incorrect. It was the phone number that was the issue.
So now I’m enrolled, but I have to wait 48 hours for them to process my account before I can sign the app…