My client's iOS In-House provisioning profiles are about to expire in 2 weeks.
So to renew them, I wanted to create a new In-House certificate. But when clicking "Add" the In-House and Ad Hoc option is disabled. What could be the cause of this?
I renewed the client's enterprise license yesterday. Could it be that it takes some time before i can create In-House certificates again? (On all my other client's (non enterpriese) accounts it works)
I'm an Agent for my company's Enterprise account and your issue is mainly as laid out above: the existence of two Enterprise certs. Where I'm slightly confused is why you have multiple folks working as your Agent. Apple has setup the Enterprise account & portal in such a way that there is to be one company-wide Agent that has complete control over that Enterprise Distribution certificate and it is paired with his/her CSR/private key. If you really want to do this properly you need to get a hold of the actual Agent in charge of the account and get him to export his private key used to sign the CSR & Distribution Cert so you can develop against it. If you're NOT the entity doing the final production builds for Enterprise deployment I would suggest better coordinating your efforts with the Agent as he may have a plan you're not aware of.
Regarding the multiple certificates Apple started doing that over a year ago so that you can smoothly cutover to a new Distribution Cert in your apps without scrambling to update all apps on the previously singular cert simultaneously.
Lastly one point to note is that while the certificate is good for 3 years your provisioning profile will still expire in 12 months time to make sure your client is scheduling their update & maintenance cadence appropriately.
Feel free to shoot me any questions on this. Good luck!
EDIT
Enterprise Overview
Developer Roles
The Agent role is meant for one person to act as a gatekeeper for that company. It's does create a problem for a large company pumping out multiple in-house apps but the control factor helps maintain a cohesive environment.
Where you're going to start getting into trouble is when your original cert is set to expire and you need to roll them over to the newer cert the other person who has Agent access created. He/she is going to have to either compile your code for you or export their private key out of keychain access so that you can use that newer Enterprise Dist Cert.
What should typically happen is an Agent creates the first cert and all in-house apps are signed to it. That cert may expire in 2016 as an example. The prov profiles will expire every year, though so each app needs to take an update at least every 12 months to refresh itself with a new prov profile. Fast fwd to the end of 2015 and you're staring down an expiring cert. You'd create the replacement cert, update the provisioning profiles for each active app with the new cert (expires in say 2019), then update each app with the new prov profile attached to the new cert before the 2016 cert goes stale.
Make sense?
I’ve a question I just opened my business, trying to get certified container homes in the USA (Florida), do I need an Engeniere or just an architect ?
Related
I support a handful of enterprise iOS apps that are distributed using AirWatch MDM. Initially, the first couple of apps were distributed all sharing the same wildcard provisioning profile.
We recently rolled out a series of apps that used the App Group capability which could not use the wildcard profile so each app created its own provisioning profile.
We have run into a couple of issues with these new apps now that the profiles are expiring. Trying to distribute the new profile via AirWatch has been unsuccessful and the only thing that has a worked for us is to deploy a new app update. I worry this approach is not really sustainable as some of these apps likely will not be updated within a year or 2 of profile updates.
I have a couple of questions from an Airwatch/MDM consulting perspective:
Is it best practice to have each app in an enterprise format have its
own profile or share profiles if possible?
Is it possible to distribute a profile with capabilities remotely?
When the certificate expires, is there anyway to fix the apps without
updating every app across the enterprise using the expiring
certificate?
Can I revoke the active certificate that is used for internally published apps prior to the expiration date without impacting them?
From a certificate administration perspective, should we create a shared Apple ID with a generic login or tie it to one particular developer?
We have very few apps now but it has become a bit of a support issue each time these expiration dates roll around and I feel like there has to be a better way for an enterprise to manage this that has hundreds of internal apps.
Is it best practice to have each app in an enterprise format have its
own profile or share profiles if possible?
Yes. I always use a specific provisioning profile for every app I manage. Using wildcard may seem easier, and it takes more time to set up every single profile, but it's more manageable.
Is it possible to distribute a profile with capabilities remotely?
Yes, but distributing the new profile via Airwatch doesn't always work.
It's rather a problem of signing more than capabilities
If the new provisioning profile is signed with the same distribution certificate, pushing it via AirWatch may work. But sometimes it won't and the user will have to manually remove and reinstall the app.
If the new profile uses a new certificate the apps will NOT receive the update. Don't trust airwatch's information about app expiration in the apps list!
My advice is to create a new version of the app and sign the IPA with the new provisioning profile, then release it as an update.
And additional advantage is that you'll keep track of who has the older version (which will stop working when the profile expires) while the new version will work just fine.
When the certificate expires, is there anyway to fix the apps without updating every app across the enterprise using the expiring certificate?
No, I usually increase the version number, create a new IPA, re-generate the provisioning prodile, use it to sign the IPA, and distribute the app as an update using AirWatch.
Can I revoke the active certificate that is used for internally published apps prior to the expiration date without impacting them?
No, if you revoke a certificate every app that uses it will stop working.
Source: https://help.apple.com/developer-account/#/dev7d381a7ff
See Apple documentation on managing expired certificates, it's long but exaustive.
From a certificate administration perspective, should we create a shared Apple ID with a generic login or tie it to one particular developer?
Use roles. The team Agent is the admin of the account and is used only when you have to accept new TOS, renew the membership, etc.
Set up developer accounts (I prefer one for each developer, so that everyone has it's own developer certificate) and make the team leader admin of the develoepr account.
This way the team leader can set up the apps for the deploy while the developer will focus on coding.
I understand it may seem complex, but once you get used to this structure you'll appreciate how manageable it is, and usually the team leader can manage many developer accounts with little work.
Supporting your mobile apps, releasing updates to follow new iOS releases and bug-fixing are time-consuming activity. And so is maintaining certificates and deploying apps. You should charge your customer for these services too, if you make B2B
We are building iOS apps for distribution in our own internal App Store using an Enterprise Developer Account from Apple. For building, we need to generate a provisioning profile, which expires 12 months from the creation. After expiration, the app doesn't work on the devices (crashes immediately because of expired Provisioning Profile), and each device needs to reinstall a new build of the app.
How can we provide our users an user friendly workflow in which they do not have to cope with crashing apps after 12 months?
Thanks in advance,
Bas
The expiration of provisioning profiles is a hassle with enterprise distributed apps. And it is something that will require ongoing maintenance from your internal development team, mobile support teams.
First, I want to point out that you don't mention certificates. Because they only expire every 3 years now (as of this writing - originally they expired every year), developers often forget about them. However, their expiration is actually more troublesome than the profiles. When a profile expires, you simply need to get another valid profile on the device. This can be done in multiple ways. You can use an mobile device management (MDM) solution to push just a new profile. Or if another app with a valid profile (that uses a wildcard ID) has been pushed to the device more recently, this can also get a valid profile on the device.
If the certificate expires, you will actually need to re-build the app with the new certificate. Old builds signed with the expired cert will not run unless. Technically, you can resign the old IPA, but the main thing to note is that the actual binary is invalid and will not work until a new binary with a proper code signing is generated. Fortunately this is only every 3 years, so it is less frequent, but I can almost promise you when it happens you will have a mess on your hands if you don't plan for it. Again, as with the provisioning profile, you could handle this by using MDM to push something new to the device. In this case, you would use MDM to actually replace the while app, not just the profile. A little more work, but it could be done.
Of course, there are reasons you may not want to use MDM. Cost could be a concern. Employees may not want the company to manage their personal devices (if these apps are going on personal devices). Ability to manage the MDM infrastructure / workload. If MDM is not a great solution for your organization, I would recommend another approach that isn't as ideal from a user experience, but could solve your problem. You could built your apps to be self-updating. In other words, on launch, your app checks a server to see if a new version is available. If so, it prompts the user to update. This wouldn't require the device to be managed, and you could easily build a shared framework to make this easy for app developers. One downside to this approach is if the user doesn't launch the app between the time you post the new version (with new profile / cert) and the time the profile or cert expires, the app will not launch, so the auto-update functionality can't run to tell the user to get a new version. It will just appear to the user as if the app is crashing. That is the one UX problem with this approach. But if you can manage that, it can provide an alternative to the MDM route.
You can manage this with an MDM server. Essentially the workflow looks something like this:
User installs MDM Profile and Accepts the prompts to allow the MDM Server to install apps.
The MDM Server is able to manage the device according to the permissions set in the MDM Profile. Apps managed by the MDM Server can then be installed and removed arbitrarily.
A quick google search for iOS MDM Server should get you headed in the right direction. Pricing for various paid options is somewhere around $15 / device / year, last time I looked into this (about a year ago). But there are one or two reasonable open source MDM Servers available as well.
Recently, I had an experience of expiring profile & certificate and my all distributed apps were stopped running. So i want to go in depth of this logic. I have few question listed below. Anyone please answer because most iOS developers still don't know the answers.
Why apple is expiring certificates and profiles exact after one year ?
Can we extend the limit of expiration year from one year to any ?
How iOS decide, The particular app certificate is expired so it should not be run in the device ?
When installed app life is deciding by iOS i.e. When app is installed first time OR when Certificates and Profiles created ?
Most iOS developers are wondering for knowing the logic behind this certificate expiration process so please answer who knows the truth behind this.
Thanks in advance.
Why apple is expiring certificates and profiles exact after one year ?
So that you don't set up a parallel app store(IMO)
Can we extend the limit of expiration year from one year to any ?
For Enterprise licenses, 'in-house' distribution profiles have a validity of 3 years. Here is an old thread you may refer.
How iOS decide, The particular app certificate is expired so it should not be run in the device ?
From Apple docs: The first time an application is opened on a device, the distribution certificate is validated by contacting Apple’s OCSP server. Unless the certificate has been revoked, the app is allowed to run.
When installed app life is deciding by iOS i.e. When app is installed first time OR when Certificates and Profiles created ?
Same as above, certificate and PP expiry dates are taken in account before running the app. Try installing an app which was signed with old certificate and you'd see.()
I am updating in-house app for a client which they have a previous version currently on over 100+ iPads.
I want to push an update, but when i try to sign the app with the distribution provisioning profile it asks me for the private key. After searching, people suggested to revoke the old certificate and generate a new one on the machine i'm using so i can have the private key. I don't know if this is the best approach or not, but my client is concerned if I will be revoking the current In-House Distribution certificate, it will affect the applications which are currently distributed on those 100+ iPads? Thanks!
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...
Toastor is correct - I recently had a discussion with Apple about this and it intentionally differs from App Store apps. When the distribution certificate is revoked (or expired) for an Enterprise app, the app stops working after expiration is reached, or revocation information is retrieved from Apple.
However if you manage several Enterprise apps, instead of requiring users to install a recompiled version of every single app with the new certificate, you may:
Push the new Provisioning Profile(s) to users over MDM (like Airwatch) **
Use a wildcard App ID for your apps and then as long as the user installs one app with the updated cert, it will apply to all apps that share that App ID
Allow users to download the updated Provisioning Profile without requiring an app install **
** CAVEAT: I don't code apps but do manage our certs, App IDs, and Provisioning Profiles. I haven't yet tested these approaches - it's my best effort based on notes from my recent discussion with Apple.
My client's iOS In-House provisioning profiles are about to expire in 2 weeks.
So to renew them, I wanted to create a new In-House certificate. But when clicking "Add" the In-House and Ad Hoc option is disabled. What could be the cause of this?
I renewed the client's enterprise license yesterday. Could it be that it takes some time before i can create In-House certificates again? (On all my other client's (non enterpriese) accounts it works)
I'm an Agent for my company's Enterprise account and your issue is mainly as laid out above: the existence of two Enterprise certs. Where I'm slightly confused is why you have multiple folks working as your Agent. Apple has setup the Enterprise account & portal in such a way that there is to be one company-wide Agent that has complete control over that Enterprise Distribution certificate and it is paired with his/her CSR/private key. If you really want to do this properly you need to get a hold of the actual Agent in charge of the account and get him to export his private key used to sign the CSR & Distribution Cert so you can develop against it. If you're NOT the entity doing the final production builds for Enterprise deployment I would suggest better coordinating your efforts with the Agent as he may have a plan you're not aware of.
Regarding the multiple certificates Apple started doing that over a year ago so that you can smoothly cutover to a new Distribution Cert in your apps without scrambling to update all apps on the previously singular cert simultaneously.
Lastly one point to note is that while the certificate is good for 3 years your provisioning profile will still expire in 12 months time to make sure your client is scheduling their update & maintenance cadence appropriately.
Feel free to shoot me any questions on this. Good luck!
EDIT
Enterprise Overview
Developer Roles
The Agent role is meant for one person to act as a gatekeeper for that company. It's does create a problem for a large company pumping out multiple in-house apps but the control factor helps maintain a cohesive environment.
Where you're going to start getting into trouble is when your original cert is set to expire and you need to roll them over to the newer cert the other person who has Agent access created. He/she is going to have to either compile your code for you or export their private key out of keychain access so that you can use that newer Enterprise Dist Cert.
What should typically happen is an Agent creates the first cert and all in-house apps are signed to it. That cert may expire in 2016 as an example. The prov profiles will expire every year, though so each app needs to take an update at least every 12 months to refresh itself with a new prov profile. Fast fwd to the end of 2015 and you're staring down an expiring cert. You'd create the replacement cert, update the provisioning profiles for each active app with the new cert (expires in say 2019), then update each app with the new prov profile attached to the new cert before the 2016 cert goes stale.
Make sense?
I’ve a question I just opened my business, trying to get certified container homes in the USA (Florida), do I need an Engeniere or just an architect ?