Will Revoking Distribution Certificate Affect Application Which Is in Review (On Apple Store) for Iphone

If I revoke an existing distribution certificate, will it mess up anything with existing apps?

There is no problem doing this unless you are on an enterprise account. Distribution certificates expire anyway, so eventually it will happen that you need a new one. Go ahead and delete away.

You can also find this question asked, answered, and asked again many times over on the Apple Dev forums (e.g. here's one), so google around there if you're still hesitant.

About Enterprise Developer accounts:
With thanks to Mike's comment

An App store app gets resigned with an Apple certificate when it goes on the store. Revoking the cert in the provisioning portal therefore won't affect it. Enterprise apps use the original certificate, which means revoking it will cause the app to stop functioning on all devices it is installed on. If you revoke an enterprise account's certificate, all apps installed on all employee devices will stop working

Will revoking In-House Distribution certificate affect applications which are currently distributed?

Unfortunately, yes. For enterprise distributed apps, the devices will regularly check with apples servers whether the certificate which has been used to sign them is still valid. So revoking the certificate will make those installations fail. Maybe not until the next reboot, maybe not when there is no internet connection available, but sooner or later, the app will refuse to launch.

If availability of the app must not be interrupted, you need to take precautions - for example by preparing the new version and notifying all users ahead of time that at a certain date, the old version will stop working and the new one must be installed.

Update:
I kept investigating and it appears like you can have two distribution certificates at the same time now. This is meant to eliminate gaps in app availability by allowing you to phase from one cert to another, way before the first one expires.

If this is still true, you might be able to simply create another distribution certificate without revoking the existing one. You will need to create new provisioning profiles as well (or update the old ones to use the new cert), but that shouldn't invalidate those already deployed. You would then be able to distribute the new / updated app and the existing installations will remain unaffected.

It has been some time since I last worked with enterprise distribution and right now, I don't have access to an enterprise dev account, so I can't try. But I don't think there is any risk if you just go ahead and try it - I assume the portal will either let you create a second cert or it just won't...

What will happen to existing builds if I revoked distribution certificate?

Revoking of the certificate will not affect the builds that are published and installed on the devices

But revoking of certificates will definitely disable your in-house app because the device will regularly validate with apple server for the certificates, that the builds are signed with the certificate are valid or not.

So your in-house build will be invalid once you revoked the certificate but your app store build will not be affected.

IOS App go down if certificate is invalid / been revoked

Yes , the current apps will have no effect of the certificate being revoked.
Happened with me many times .

similar question threads here

Will revoking Distribution certificate affect application which is In Review (on apple store) for Iphone?

If I revoke an existing distribution certificate, will it mess up anything with existing apps?

iOS Provisioning and Certifcates - Will Revoke/Renew effect App Store Apps?

For App Store apps, you don't need to worry. The signing information on app store binaries is only used for the initial validation to ensure it came from you. Once it has been uploaded the binary will be transformed and resigned with Apple's private key, encrypted with Fairplay, etc.

This means revoking your distribution certification will not affect live apps. You only need to worry if you have an enterprise account.

Distribution certificates for iPhone

You will be fine with revoking your distribution certificate and making a new one. You can still update an existing app after doing this.

Relevant info:

Lost Private Key For iPhone Distribution Certificate. What could be solutions?

If I revoke an existing distribution certificate, will it mess up anything with existing apps?

When renewing an iOS distribution certificate, what will happen to my app that is in review? and will it use the same privarte key?

This question likely hasn't received a lot of attention as the second of your question calls for speculation on the inner workings and process of Apple and the App Store Review Team. Let's deal with what we absolutely know first:

Will it use the same private key or will a new signing request be needed?

Yes, so long as you tap the 'Renew' button, the existing public-private key pair will be used and a new certificate will be issued with an expiry set in the future. This avenue is the quickest and most painless way to deal with your code signing identity renewals. The Organizer will download and install the reissued certificate and once your current certificate formally expires, it will auto-switch to the new certificate.

If, however, you accidentally delete either your private or public key, then you will need to:

1. Go through the CSR process
2. Reissue your certificate
3. Install your certificate
4. Reissue your provisioning profiles
5. Remove the old profiles
6. Install the new profiles
7. Update code sign settings if necessary
8. Retest the build to make sure everything works properly.

Clearly this is way more work when done by hand and the one-touch renew button is a much quicker way to skip all of that manual code sign maintenance.

What will happen to my app that has not yet been approved? Will I have to re-build / re-sign the app?

As a heads-up, this subquestion calls for speculation about Apple's internal practices and as such should be treated with an appropriate amount of skepticism. Just to be crystal clear: I have no inside knowledge about how the App Review Team and their tools for approving apps work behind the scenes, but can speak to the technical aspects of the certificate and what may shake out from a certificate expiry mid-review.

We know from issuing our other apps that after the review process happens and an app is formally approved, there is a 'Preparing for AppStore' state that typically takes a few minutes to complete before transitioning to 'Ready for Sale'. Incidentally, this delay closely mirrors that of the application packaging and code signature phases of our own Xcode build process. Second, it would make little sense for Apple to prepare each and every binary it receives for the App Store. We know that there are a non-trivial number of submitted builds that get rejected each day for various violations of the Developer Program, blatant application crashes, and even the occasional invalid rejection. Collectively, these 'bad builds' will never hit the App Store, so it would make little sense to waste the time, effort, and storage space stashing these prepared apps just in case they were to get approved (you know we developers...we're overly protective of our time on the processor and our storage space!) Anyways, if you accept these hypothesis' as fact, then here's how an expired distribution certificate would likely impact your mid-review app:

If the App Store Review Team has not started the review

Your build would be rejected as the embedded provisioning profiles would be expired at the time the Reviewer picks up your app from the queue. While the Reviewer likely resigns a copy of your app for their own internal test devices, I'm certain the Review Team has a tool, script, or the iTunes Connect portal itself responsible for validating certain technical elements of the uploaded binary much like Xcode and the Application Uploader do at the time of submission. In this case, a simple rebuild and resubmit with the new distribution certificate and profile is all that is needed.

If the App Store Review Team has started the review

Depending on when the reviewer's device performs its next ad-hoc build check, your app may or may not launch on the reviewer's device(s). If it continues to work for the balance of the review cycle, and gets the team's stamp of approval, then you wouldn't need to worry about anything until you want to submit the next version.

On the other hand, if it does check and fail to launch the next time the review reopens the app, then you'll get an iTunes Connect rejection notice. Like before a rebuild and resubmit is all that would be necessary.

Alternatively, you could simply resign the expired binary using the code sign command line tool, however the specifics of doing so are outside the scope of this SO question so I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader (or for the reader to open another SO question!)

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