As the original TestFlight app will be retired in a month, I am trying to get to grips with the iTunes Connect Beta system, which looks like a significant improvement. As directed, I regenerated my provisioning profiles and redownloaded them on my build server.
I then performed the build with the "AppStore|Release" profile and I saw this message in the log:
codesign -v -f -s "XXXXXX" "--resource-rules=/.../MyApp.app/ResourceRules.plist" --entitlements "/../iSnagMobileiOS.xcent" "/../iSnagMobileiOS.app"
The file specified in the entitlements parameter contained the beta-reports-active key as expected:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>get-task-allow</key>
<false/>
<key>application-identifier</key>
<string>XXXXXXX.com.mycompany.myapp</string>
<key>com.apple.developer.team-identifier</key>
<string>XXXXXXXX</string>
<key>beta-reports-active</key>
<true/>
<key>keychain-access-groups</key>
<array>
<string>XXXXX.com.mycompany.myapp</string>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>
I then retrieved the generated IPA, which was signed with my distribution certificate. In order to check that the correct entitlement had been applied, I executed this command to check the provisioning profile:
unzip -p MyApp.ipa Payload/MyApp.app/embedded.mobileprovision | security cms -D
Within the XML fragment I could see the entitlements dictionary which contained the flag as expected:
<key>Entitlements</key>
<dict>
<key>keychain-access-groups</key>
<array>
<string>XXXXXXXX.*</string>
</array>
<key>get-task-allow</key>
<false/>
<key>application-identifier</key>
<string>XXXXXXXX.com.mycompany.myapp</string>
<key>com.apple.developer.team-identifier</key>
<string>XXXXXXXXX</string>
<key>beta-reports-active</key>
<true/>
</dict>
There is also no extra Entitlements.plist file in the IPA that might be throwing this off.
I uploaded the IPA with Application Loader 3.0, but I then received this error message:
WARNING: ITMS-90191: "Missing beta entitlement. Your app does not include the beta-reports-active entitlement. If you intend to distribute this build via TestFlight for beta testing, please re-build this app with a newly generated provisioning profile."
I have found numerous hits while searching for this message but none seemed to describe the above the problem; all those users found that regenerating the profile and downloading it again was all that was required.
I wondered if I was perhaps experiencing an issue caused by an older version of XCode or MonoTouch but after I updated both, I still experienced the same problem. I'm going to guess that this issue is not caused by Xamarin but is perhaps caused by a setting I have overlooked in my build configuration, but I could be wrong there.