Question

I’m working for a company that has already released an app on the store. So – they have already created a Distribution certificate.
The person has left, and now I have to set up the Ad Hoc installs and Distribution for a new app.

The iPhone Developer Program User Guide states:

Saving your Private Key and Transferring to Other Systems

It is critical that you save your
private key somewhere safe in the
event that you need to build your
application on multiple Macs or decide
to reinstall your system OS. Without
your private key, you cannot sign
binaries in Xcode and there you will
be unable to upload your application
to the App Store or install your
application on any Apple device. When
a CSR is generated, the Keychain
Access application creates a private
key on your login keychain. This
private key is tied to your user
account and cannot be reproduced if
lost due to an OS reinstall. If you
plan to do development and testing on
multiple systems, you will need to
import your private key onto all of
the systems you’ll be doing work on.

I do not have access to these keys which have been generated by someone else using Keychain Access. Can I still build for Ad Hoc and Distribution?

Or do I need to revoke this Distribution Certificate and start again…. will this affect the app that has been already submitted?

Answer 1

You need the private key to sign the app. The easiest thing to do is probably to try contacting the “someone else” to recover the key.

I’ve recently regenerate our Distribution certificate because the old one expired — the only problem is that provisioning profiles created with the old certificate are incompatible with the new certificate, so existing Development/Ad Hoc builds will stop working when those certificates expire.

I haven’t heard any problems from customers using App Store builds.