How can we take over an abandoned account / app (e.g. when a colleague / team mate created an App, but left the company)?

There are a couple of possible solutions, although a few might be quite time consuming:

First of all, if you don’t need that specific app and you need a quick way to “disconnect” it from your account, you can simply Leave the app’s team, by visiting the Team tab of the app. If you’re an admin in the app’s team you can simply delete yourself from the app’s team. If you’re a developer or tester in the app’s team then you have to click the “leave” button on the team tab

If you need that app / have to take over an account

If you need that app, and you need it to be transferred to another user or organization, that’s quite a bit more complicated. ​Unfortunately only the owner can transfer the app. Just to make it sure, we can’t provide the password/login of any user because we don’t know user passwords. No user password is stored in the database, only a non reversible hash of the password.

First question is, can you contact the owner? If you can, you should, any manual step we’d take will take more time than this.

Or, if it’s a company email, do you have access to the old owner’s email address? If you can receive emails at that email address you can simply request a password reset for that email, on the sign in page, by clicking the Forgot your password? link

If the email/domain is managed by your company but that email address no longer exists, please request it to be registered again temporarily (from your IT department). Once you can receive emails there and you have access to the email, just request the password reset email.

If no previous step works for your use case you can contact us too. Be aware that this will be a really long, manual process! We don’t take account takeover lightly and will only do it if there’s no other way to handle the situation, and we’ll start with contacting the previous owner any way we can, including sending an email to that account’s email address. We won’t take any action unless that’s approved by the account’s current owner, unless we can prove it that the account is actually abandoned and we can’t contact the owner anymore. But even in that case we’ll take additional steps to verify both the “abandoned” account’s owner as well as the other user who requests the transfer.

It’s also important to note that we won’t do any action unless your account is in that app’s Team! If your account is not part of the app’s team we simply don’t have any way to verify that you had any connection to that user/app at all.

If you have any questions, as always, just let us know!

Feel free to leave a comment here or contact us through email/the onsite chat, but before you’d do that please make sure to read through the guide above, as it’s almost certain that requesting a transfer/takeover from us is the slowest procedure.