Inquiry About Push Notification Behavior After App Transfer

Question

Created Aug ’25

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We are in the process of transferring our app to a new Apple Developer Organization account. Our app uses the Apple Push Notification service (APNs) with a .p8 authentication key configured on our server to send push notifications.

We would like to confirm: Once the app transfer is completed, will push notifications continue to work temporarily using the existing .p8 key on our server, until we generate and configure a new .p8 key under the new organization's account?

Understanding this behavior is critical for us to ensure a smooth transition and avoid any disruption in push notification delivery for our users.

Thank you for your guidance and support.

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Answer 1

Engineer OP

Apple

Aug ’25

Once the transfer is completed, you would no longer be able to send any notifications using the old .p8 key.

Once the transfer is complete, the apns-topic (which is, or based on the app Bundle ID) to send the pushes to will no longer belong to the old team, and their credentials can no longer be used. Once the topic is moved to the new team's account, only the new team can authenticate with APNs to send notifications to that app.

When the app is removed from the old team, their push requests will start to fail. At that point, you should be able to start using the Certificates or Keys generated by the new team.

There will be a trivial but non-zero gap between the ability to send notifications between the old and new teams.

While you may see that already existing open connections between the old team's servers and APNs might still be able to send notifications for a while, this is not something you can count on.

So, the best strategy is going to be to prepare your .p8 keys and JWT creation scripts beforehand and be prepared to switch to the new credentials as soon as you start seeing failures with the old credentials.

Argun Tekant /  DTS Engineer / Core Technologies

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Answer 2

SharathRajParthiban OP

Aug ’25

Thanks for the clarification. I have one more question:

After transferring an iOS app to a new Apple Developer account, if we update the backend server with the new .p8 file (for APNs authentication), but the app installed on user devices is still signed with the old distribution certificate (and therefore has the old Team ID), will push notifications continue to work with the new .p8 file? Or is it necessary to submit a new binary to the App Store, signed with the new account’s certificate and Team ID, for push notifications to function correctly?

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