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I have an in-house enterprise app that is managed (deployed) from MaaS360 'https://portal.fiberlink.com'

And this app is built (and still maintained) in XCode 4.6.3 (i know, i know), so I don't have any of the fancy new features in XCode 7 that might help alleviate this problem. In fact, even the refresh button in Organizer no longer works... you tap it and a dialog says "service unavailable" and I've tried it on different days, so it's not just a temporary glitch or service interruption. I believe apple disabled whatever portion of their service was servicing that request from XCode 4's Organizer.

The provisioning profile on it is going to expire in March, and I'm trying to figure out how to renew it without inconveniencing the users by making them download a new rebuilt app. It would be particularly painful for them because it would require they sync a few gigabytes of data from their device through iTunes for each person, and it's a few hundred people.

My problem is, my certificate I used to sign the app is also expiring around the same time (in March).

I happened to have another certificate and an associated provisioning profile, I had generated on a different mac which expires in 2019, and I tried to use it to update the expiring provisioning profile on MaaS360 for this app in question, and I get this error

enter image description here

So what has me a little terrified is, I'm back on the mac where I originally created and deployed the app... if I need to renew my existing certificate (which I assume means revoking it and replacing it with a new one), in order to create a new provisioning profile, aren't I going to run into this dialog again, claiming that my certificates don't match, because I'll now have a new one, hence I can't update the profile.

If the only way to update my expiring provisioning profile is with my soon-to-be-expired-but-also-identical certificate which originally created the profile, that still means my profile is going to expire as scheduled because my original certificate will have expired too.

Is there a way out of this dilemma?

Logicsaurus Rex
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1 Answers1

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You can have two certificates active at the same time. So I would generate a new certificate using the same key you used to generate the original one. To do this on the Apple developer portal, you will need the cert signing request. Most developers don't save this when they generate their certificate the first time. The good news is, if you have the private key that was used for your distribution certificate, you can use that to generate the CSR. To find out if you have the private key, you can use this post for how to locate it in the Keychain app. https://stackoverflow.com/a/33651921/3708242

Once you have verified that you have the private key used for the certificate for the app store distribution, you can generate the a CSR using the following procedure: https://stackoverflow.com/a/7111454/3708242

Once you have the CSR, go to Apple's developer portal and generate a new distribution certificate for "In-House and Ad Hoc" distribution. As long as you only have one out there, you should be able to create a second without having to revoke the existing one. Once you've done that, you will likely need to provide that certificate to the MaaS360 service (I'm not familiar with how that works, but somehow the Maas360 server must have the private key and certificate that the apps were built with, as it is clearly checking that when you push the build of your app and the certs don't match). So download the new cert and provide that to MaaS360.

Then, generate a new distribution profile using the new certificate. Or you can update the existing one to use the new cert by clicking the edit button on the provisioning profile, then changing the radio button to the new cert which should expire several years out. Note that this won't prevent any existing apps built using the profile from running in the meantime (revoking the certificate, however, would immediately cause the apps to stop working, which you don't want). Save and download the new profile, and use it to rebuild the app.

The app will then be built with the new certificate, that won't expire any time soon. I do think you are missing the part of the process where you will have to provide the new cert to MaaS360. I can't really help you with that part, but hopefully there is some documentation from IBM that can help you out there. But, you will need to fix it, because once the cert expires, non of the apps built with it will work. Good luck and let me know if any of this is not clear enough.

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wottle
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  • If you have a boss, tell him/her you just earned a 20% raise. – Logicsaurus Rex Feb 27 '16 at 20:25
  • Ha. I will let you know how that goes. Hope you were / are able to get it updated. Expiring certificates can be a headache, but at least you are out in front of it. Most internal app developers find out when all their internal apps start crashing on launch. – wottle Feb 29 '16 at 00:28