What Happens If My Distribution Certificate Expires

What happens if my distribution certificate expires?

What happens if my certificate expires or has been revoked?

Apple Push Notification Service Certificate

You can no longer send push notifications to your app.

Pass Type ID Certificate (Passbook)

If your certificate expires, passes that are already installed on users' devices will continue to function normally. However, you will no longer be able to sign new passes or send updates to existing passes. If your certificate has been revoked, your passes will no longer function properly.

iOS Distribution Certificate (App Store)

If your iOS Developer Program membership is valid, your existing apps on the App Store will not be affected. However, you will no longer be able to submit new apps or updates to the App Store.

iOS Distribution Certificate (In-house, Internal Use Apps)

Users will no longer be able to run apps that have been signed with this certificate. You must distribute a new version of your app that is signed with a new certificate.

Mac App Distribution Certificate and Mac Installer Distribution Certificate (Mac App Store)

If your Mac Developer Program membership is valid, your existing apps on the Mac App Store will not be affected. However, you will no longer be able to submit new apps or updates to the Mac App Store.

Developer ID Application Certificate and Developer ID Installer Certificate (Mac Applications)

If your certificate expires, users can still download, install, and run versions of your Mac applications that were signed with this certificate. However, you will need a new certificate to sign updates and new applications. If your certificate has been revoked, users will no longer be able to install applications that have been signed with this certificate.

Original Source Apple Doc

iOS distribution certificate expires - Is a new certificate created automatically?

In Xcode 13, automatic certificates and signing means that the certificate is created automatically and held in the cloud, so there is nothing to do. You could probably delete your distribution identity / certificate right now and everything would go on working.

What will happen if iOS distribution certificate expired?

If distribution certificate expired then you can't submit apps in Apple Store. Existing/Submitted apps will work fine. No need to worry about it.

How to manage Enterprise Distribution certificate expiration?

This is an issue that we have been dealing since the last 2 years. The in-house applications do stop working after 1 year. It is a massive exercise for an organization like ours to rebuild hundreds of apps and redeploy it on thousands of devices every year.

For us it is a month long exercise where we rebuild all our apps and inform all users to get new ones through the distribution channel. Still every year some users are left with non-functional apps.

I have filed an enhancement request with Apple(Bug ID#9848075) for this and am still waiting for a reply.

EDIT:
The above mentioned bug is closed now. Here's the official response:

Distribution certs for enterprise are now 3 years in duration.

Apple says Your iOS Distribution Certificate expiring what i need to do

As per new updates, you don't need to renew the certificate as a separate action. The renewal is based on the expiration of the Apple developer account. By taking the action of renewing your membership, this will automatically renew your certificates.

Proper way to renew distribution certificate for iOS

Your live apps will not be taken down. Nothing will happen to anything that is live in the app store.

Once they formally expire, the only thing that will be impacted is your ability to sign code (and thus make new builds and provide updates).

Regarding your distribution certificate, once it expires, it simply disappears from the ‘Certificates, Identifier & Profiles’ section of Member Center. If you want to renew it before it expires, revoke the current certificate and you will get a button to request a new one.

Regarding the provisioning profile, don't worry about it before expiration, just keep using it. It's easy enough to just renew it once it expires.

The peace of mind is that nothing will happen to your live app in the store.

Let ios Distribution Certificate expire if I don't want new updates

It depends if you are on Enterprise or Standard iOS Developer program:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2250/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40009933-CH1-TNTAG6

Short story is that for Standard program it's safe to do anything with your certs - all applications are resigned with Apple certificates in that case. So it's all good even if your certs will expire or if you revoke them manually.

For Enterprise it's a different story - but it's less likely to be your case.

ios in-house distribution certificate expires

All the answers for the questions that I asked is provided in the apple document in this pdf. For those who are too lazy to read the entire document to get the answer, below are the answers to my question from the document.

The document says

1. Distribution provisioning profiles expire 12 months after they’re issued. After the
   expiration date, the profile is removed and the app won’t launch. When your distribution certificate expires, the app won’t launch. Your distribution
   certificate is valid for three years from when it was issued, or until your Enterprise
   Developer Program membership expires, whichever comes first.

2. You can have two distribution certificates active at the same time; each is
   independent from the other. The second certificate is intended to provide an
   overlapping period during which you can update your apps before the first
   certificate expires. When requesting your second distribution certificate from
   the iOS Dev Center, be sure you don’t revoke your first certificate.

3. Revoking a distribution certificate invalidates all of the apps you’ve signed with it.
   You should revoke a certificate only as a last resort—if you’re sure the private key is
   lost or the certificate is believed to be compromised.

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