I would like to call for discussion on the scope of this site in light of recent changes by Apple to broaden the audience for the iTunes Connect program.
I understand the initial hesitance to have Developer questions here on the end user forum - especially with Stack Overflow for hard developer questions and audience from coding to the app submission process. However, more and more end users are stepping forward to create iTunes connect accounts.
I don't see any reason to expand the scope to include how to program at this point, but it seems overly restrictive to keep iTunes Connect in the "out of bounds" portion of scope for Apple products and services.
What started as a Service for developers to sell iOS apps has now has served up:
- One Billion iTunes U downloads
- 25 Billion iTunes songs sold
- 40 Billion App store purchases with almost 20 Billion in 2012 alone
There will be questions about third party tools to manage billing, prepare songs and books for sale, and other topics related to selling or giving away content through the various Apple electronic storefronts. I think we can avoid any NDA issues by insisting that answers be sourced from public resources and be willing to clearly close or answer off-topic questions pointing the asker's to Apple's official channel for support in those cases.
I think the site was served well by initially discouraging iOS developers from asking iTunes connect questions, but now that we are excluding teachers, artists, musicians, authors and programmers from asking iTunes Connect questions we're missing a large audience of people that use and work with one of Apple's most notable and unique services - their integrated store front for content creators.