OT: How to renew iOS Certificates?

[Dave Kilroy]

Hi Graham

Yep you need to be careful with iOS developer and distribution certificates - mostly because you have almost no control over them Apple controls them and if something goes wrong you are at their mercy - it went wrong for me and now I can't sign code or build for iOS devices and am constrained to the simulator.

You can (I think the word is 'rescind') your developer and distribution certificates at the Provisioning Portal and get Apple to create new ones for you - although as Chris says it's easier if you let Xcode do this for you.

When my developer certificate was expiring I must have done something Apple didn't like because I ended up with two developer certificates, which throws an error and stops me building standalones for iOS

The best info I found on the process is Apple's Technical Note TN2250 - but with any luck if you instead read Apple's guides with more insight than I you will sail through the process.

BTW - for those who are interested, I don't have an extra developer certificate in my keychain, nor in the preferences folder of Xcode, nor anywhere I can find on my machine - the naughty extra certificate gets imported from the Provisioning Profile each time I get Xcode to refresh. <sigh> and I've been phoning the WorldWide Apple Developer Center since 23rd November (apparently engineers in Cupertino have looked at my problem and don't know how to fix it)

So good luck but be careful!

Dave



> I am probably not alone in finding the whole business of administering the iOS development process a bit of a nightmare - a nightmare set in a jungle, perhaps. The thing is, I develop alone, at my own pace, and I don't always remember the way Apple does things.
> 
> Now I find that two certificates I need - a Development Certificate and a Distribution Certificate - are about to expire, in a couple of days in fact. My Developer subscription isn't up until April, so all I want to do is to renew the certificates, but so far I can't find out how to do it. I feel I have searched the iOS Developer's documentation jungle pretty thoroughly, but I haven't found any kind of step-by-step guide. I have a vague feeling that what one has to do is just to let these ones go and create new ones, but I haven't (yet) found any text saying so, and I don't know where this notion came from.
> 
> Could someone very kindly give me some insight into this? And if they're feeling very generous, perhaps that same person could say what version of XCode I should be using with LC 5.5.3. At the moment I'm using 4.5.1 and it works, but there's a newer version, isn't there?
> 
> Thanks to anyone who replies.
> 
> Graham