Howdy,
I thought this would be an easy question, but it turns out it's really not! In fact, it flies in the face of how the Apple ecosystem is set up. That said, I still need an answer to be able to inform our customers of what their app update options are.
The question: Does app store provisioning ever expire? Based on the very limited information I can find, it either expires in one year, two years, or never. Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that the answer could be never, but I need to confirm this.
The use case: Some of our customers are very old school. They tend to find a technical solution and stick with it. As such, they do not update apps regularly on their field iPads. They generally only update when they are forced to. They use MDM to deploy the app, and would set the MDM not to pull updated apps from the app store when available, essentially keeping the same version of the app in use for as much as 3 years or more. If this were to happen, I need to know if the provisioning for the old version of the app will ever expire if they get it from the app store.
I know with an enterprise deployment of .ipa files via MDM, the app provisioning/certificate will expire after 1 or 2 years (can't remember which atm), but I can't find an answer about app store provisioning. Hopefully someone can provide me with an answer on this forum.
Thanks in advance,
Mapguy
The App Store checks credentials when you submit the app. It then re-signs app for distribution. That means that the credentials on the distributed app are disconnected from the credentials you used to submit, and thus the app never expires.
I talk about this is the Inside Code Signing technotes:
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TN3125 Inside Code Signing: Provisioning Profiles mentions that App Store apps don’t have embedded profiles.
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TN3161 Inside Code Signing: Certificates talks the certificate side of this.
While there are probably are some obscure corner cases that I’m not aware of, in general, once a user installs an App Store app they can continue using it indefinitely.
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