Xcode 9 and ERROR ITMS-4088

28. September 2017 Settings, Tools, Xcode 3

I think most of us were absolutely happy when we downloaded the Xcode 9, and started to enjoy the new features. I was happy as well, but my happiness didn’t take long. My face started to turn into a frowning face, immediately after when I wanted to upload my current project to the App Store. The error message was:

ERROR ITMS-4088: “The organization Peter Molnar does not have permission to modify the application with the Apple ID XXXXXXX. Please try again, using an account for an organization with access to this application.” at SoftwareAssets

Well, that’s not what you want to see on the day of the project deadline. As it turn out I wasn’t alone, it seems that the new Xcode 9 build system, and namely the Organizer (available in Xcode in Window menu -> Organizer) missing an important step, which was present in Xcode 8, and I mean this screen, where you can select which developer profile do you want to use for the upload:

I think if you are a freelancer developer, you might have different profiles, with different Apple ID for your different projects, and actually that happened in this case. In this case you have 2 options:

  1. If you know the Apple ID and the password you can use the Application Loader.
  2. If you don’t know, my solution is to download the previous Xcode version (which is still available in an archive file from the https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ (you will need at least one working Apple ID with the Apple Developer Program), unarchive it, and rename the Xcode.app. In this case you will still have a backup of the version of 8.3.3. Now you can use the Organiser as you get used to it. The only side effect is that probably you can’t upload archives with iOS 11 (but I haven’t tested this).

I hope with the Xcode 9.1 this feature will be fixed, although the release notes of the 9.1 beta (Release Notes) doesn’t mention anything about it :(.


3 thoughts on “Xcode 9 and ERROR ITMS-4088”

  • 1
    Armando on September 29, 2017 Reply

    This is so fucking stupid, in my case I am part of 4 teams, and each time I try to upload it uses a random team, until it decides to use the correct one after trying at least 10 times.

    • 2
      petermolnar on September 29, 2017 Reply

      I consider myself lucky, but have only 3 entities. Actually 2 of them are not with an organization based account, so the team management doesn’t apply for them. Actually, that’s another painful point: if you are self employed, you cannot have organizational account, and therefore no team management. There are a lot of indie developers who are employing other devs, and it would be great if we could manage teams as well.

  • 3
    chauyan on October 2, 2017 Reply

    This is really stupid thing, I am also part of several teams, but I need to use Apploader to login each different team and submit my app …. wtf …

    Thanks for sharing this error and possible solution, really dumb for apple

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