Common emails you may receive from Apple

As part of your developer account membership with Apple you will occasionally receive emails about events in your account. This document contains the most common emails you are likely to receive, explains what they mean, and what impact (if any) they have on your account with regards to Aiir's services.

Action Required: iOS Distribution Certificate Expires in 30 Days

When we submit apps to Apple for the App Store, we have to use a certificate which is a file that proves we are an authorised agent of your developer account. These allow us to securely sign the app so no one else can tamper with the file without it being detectable.

We handle this process on your behalf, creating a new certificate when we first submit an app. These certificates are then valid for 12 months before expiring and we can re-use the same certificate multiple times during that process for other apps inside the same developer account or app updates. If the expiration falls outside a period of time we're actively using your account, there's a chance the current certificate will expire triggering this email.

If the certificate expires, it does not affect your app currently in the store, it just means we are unable to submit an update or new app until we renew the certificate, which will happen as part of our usual release process.

Action Needed: Apple Push Services Certificate Expires in 30 Days

The Apple Push Services Certificate was a requirement for your app to support sending push notifications to users.

We've been moving away from using this certificate, to a new method that doesn't expire.

This email simply means that the old certificate is about to expire, but providing you've kept your Apple Developer account in good standing, we'll have switched your app to use the new method, so this email can be safely discarded.

Aiir [team member name] has revoked your certificate, so it is no longer valid

Depending on which certificate is revoked, this has little or no impact. If it's a distribution certificate it means that certificate can no longer be used to issue an app update, but we're typically in the process of revoking this one to create a new one. If it's a push certificate, you will not be able to send a push notification to your app until a new one is created and updated within Aiir. We don't usually notify you of completing this process.

Apple enforce limits on the number of active certificates that can be held at one time. We may need to "revoke" one to clear room for us to issue a new one. We try and avoid this where possible, so we can smooth transition between certificates without issue, but this can be difficult if Aiir are not the exclusive supplier of apps within your Apple Developer account.

We may also have to revoke and reissue a push certificate for a new app within an account that has other existing apps. This is because we use a common key pair for all push certificates that a single client uses.

Similarly we have to log in every 12 months to renew your push certificate so you can continue to use the Push Notifications features of Aiir. In doing this we create a secondary, new, push certificate and swap over to using that, before revoking the older one. This is to keep your account tidy and also to prevent the "Certificate Expires" notification being sent to you, as we try and do these just outside the 30 day window for that email to be sent.

The email I've received isn't listed here

As Apple are an external provider, they regularly make changes to their services without notifying us, so you may have received something new that we've not seen before. Equally it could be a more serious issue with your account. If you do receive a message that you're concerned about, please forward it to support@aiir.com where we can assist you.