Apple provisioning profile expired - app won't launch or install

Hi there,

So our provisioning profile expired yesterday and then our ios app was unlaunchable from anyone’s iphone and also when trying to reinstall it would lay down a grey icon (unbranded) and again would be unlaunchable. By “unlaunchable” I mean if you tap it it would do absolutely nothing.

We created a new provisioning profile in the Apple Developer portal and then downloaded it and then used expo cli to clear the credentials and added the new profile with our existing certificate (which has NOT expired yet) and our existing APN key (which doesn’t have an expiry date apparently). After doing a build we expected an OTA to take care of all of our installs out there that couldnt launch the app but it didn’t. They still couldn’t launch it. We had to delete and reinstall the app on all of our devices.

As you can imagine this is a TERRIBLE user experience. I’m wondering if there is some way to avoid this every time that profile expires? It expires in a year.

Any ideas or suggestions are welcome!? I didn’t find anyone else complaining about this in the forums so I’m hoping we’re just missing the boat somewhere and there’s a way to avoid this.

Really need an answer here please expo team! :slight_smile:

Hi @pocketencasa,
Sorry your users are having this bad experience! Your provisioning profile should only be used at build time, so I suspect your issue is coming from another cause. https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/distribution/app-signing/#provisioning-profiles

Unfortunately I don’t have any great guidance on what that might be. The grey icon suggests that maybe the binary being installed is not the one you intend? Please let us know what you end up finding for anyone else who runs into a similar situation

Good luck!

Hmmm… if it “should” only be used at build time then why did the app stop working precisely when the provisioning profile expired? Once I got an update provisioning profile created and built the app and installed it on the devices again, the app ran perfectly.

Perhaps I should say this is a self-hosted app, NOT in the app store. Now does that change your answer?

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