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I am pretty new to IOS development and honestly don't know much about certificates, except for the part that they are needed for the application to be posted on Apple store.

My company has few apps on Apple Store, and I got an email saying, "Your Apple Push Notification Service Certificate will expire in 30 days.", for one of the applications.

Now, I am not sure how to renew this certificate.

Here is what I did...

  1. I logged in to developer.apple.com
  2. Went to Certificates, Identifiers and Profiles
  3. Located the application that I got the message for

And Now, I am not sure what to do..

Please see the screenshot below, to see where I ended up..

And from here.. What do I do?

The certificate didn't expire yet, so can I renew it right now? or should I wait for it to expire? If i can do it right now, what do I do? Click on Create Certificate and create a new one? How do I do it?

enter image description here

sha
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Vamsi Challa
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1 Answers1

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Just generate a new certificate and replace the old one.

As a side note: when your existing APNS certificate expired, if your server still uses it - existing iOS applications will not be able to receive any notifications from your server. But as soon as you regenerate certificate and update your server to use it - everything will be normal again without any changes to already installed apps.

sha
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    Okie.. so i click on create certificate and then replace the old one. Got it till there.. do I need to have anything, like old keys or something to create the certificate? – Vamsi Challa Dec 20 '13 at 15:26
  • No. By `replace` I meant replace it whenever you're using it. Certificate sitting in the dev portal doesn't do anything. You need to to use in your application that sends notifications. And you need to provide that new cert to the application. – sha Dec 20 '13 at 15:27
  • Okie.. understood a bit.. thanks.. – Vamsi Challa Dec 20 '13 at 15:30
  • If i create a new certificate, will it automatically change the existing certificate in app store? or any complications of that sort? – Vamsi Challa Dec 20 '13 at 15:33
  • It didn't, I just have two now.. Okie.. thanks – Vamsi Challa Dec 20 '13 at 15:36
  • This question has caught my attention (and I'm not very used with certificates too). I wonder if we need to regenerate a distribution profile when renewing push certificates, and if it implies an update of the app. – zbMax Dec 20 '13 at 15:40
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    You don't need to regenerate distribution profile. These are two independent things. More over when you do regenerate distribution profile - it doesn't mean you HAVE to update apps. Existing apps will still work (as long as your dev account is active) – sha Dec 20 '13 at 17:04
  • So, when the app APNS Certificate expires, 1. Do you have to update the app with the new certificate? and 2. Do push messages stop arriving to users till there is a new non-expired certificate? – lnjuanj Dec 21 '13 at 19:20
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    @lnjuanj: 1. No 2. Yes – sha Dec 21 '13 at 19:25
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    Could you add that comment to your answer? It's been extremely useful to me and I'd like to upvote your answer. – lnjuanj Dec 21 '13 at 19:40
  • but what if i create a new push certf instead of renewing the older one.. with a new key value pair in the certf now old version of my app won't receive the push right? – hemant Mar 19 '15 at 05:56
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    @hemant: certificates are immutable. You will be creating new one anyway. Your old app will be fine. – sha Mar 19 '15 at 12:33
  • should I revoke existing certificate and create a new certificate? – iPP Aug 29 '16 at 09:27
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    @iPP - you can do this too, but revoking is not necessary. – sha Aug 29 '16 at 14:12
  • Here is how to generate a new push cert: https://developer.clevertap.com/docs/how-to-create-an-ios-apns-certificate – Taylor Hawkes May 07 '19 at 17:02