Provisioning profiles status invalid (managed by XCode)

Question

Suddenly all my provisioning profiles are in status Invalid (managed by XCode). Why?

Also I remember in XCode 4 that you always had to create your provisioning profile. Now XCode autocreates your provisioning profile for development. Is this a new feature on XCode 6?

Answer 1

I had the same problem today.

In the Apple Developer website, all of my company's Provisioning Profiles were marked as "Invalid (managed in Xcode)". None were out of them were date, none were using iOS Certificates which had expired, and the website gave zero suggestion that anything was actually wrong.

The solution, ridiculously, was to delete my perfectly valid iOS Certificates, and recreate them.

We write in-house apps aswell as apps for the App Store, and Apple (quietly) refuses to let you have more than 2 of these at once. So I was unable to create a third iOS Certificate which would allow me to use the "In house and Ad-hoc" option, hence the need to delete an iOS Certificate first.

Once I had pointlessly recreated the "iOS Certificate", the Provisioning Profiles came to life.

Part 2 of this farce is to go into Xcode, and delete your Provision Profiles (XCode \ Preferences \ select your iOS Certificate \ View Details, then select all of your provisioning profiles, right click and select "Move to trash".

At this point, absolutely nothing will change, and you'll think you've done something wrong.

But then, if you then quit Xcode, and go back in, then you'll see the Provisioning Profiles will have disappeared.

Now you can re-download the Provisioning Profiles from the Apple Developers website, and redownload the latest versions.

Until Xcode 7.2 comes along, and breaks something else.

(Seriously, I spend more time fighting with Xcode bugs than writing code..)

Answer 2

Apple introduced Xcode Managed profiles in Xcode 5 as a way to try and make the provisioning process less cumbersome and get Developers sending code to their devices without having to go through the manual upload/setup/download/install/build process. In effect, Xcode was completely automating the entire provisioning process whenever there was a code sign error detected. For developers that had already wrestled with understanding Provisioning, this new behavior was frustrating as the processes those teams put in place were unintentionally being wrecked by Xcode's best attempts to be helpful. That said, it is better today but not as transparent as it should be when it comes to affecting your Certificates, Identities, and Profiles data. If you are't familiar with what all is included in a provisioning profile or signing identity, there's some related reading you might want to skim: What are code signing identities?

Suddenly all my provisioning profiles are in status Invalid (managed by XCode). Why?

The most common reason for a profile to move to the "Invalid" state is because at least one of the profile's registered test devices has been deactivated / removed from the developer's account. By doing so, all profiles that included that device UDID are marked as invalid and require regeneration. This can be accomplished in Xcode > Preferences > Accounts, clicking 'View Details' on your Apple ID account, and then clicking the refresh button in the lower right corner of that account details screen.

Also I remember in XCode 4 that you always had to create your provisioning profile. Now XCode autocreates your provisioning profile for development. Is this a new feature on XCode 6?

As stated in the start of this answer, no. Autogenerated provisioning profiles were introduced in Xcode 5 and the workflow has been refined several times since Xcode 5.0 and modern Xcode. If you allow Xcode to assist you with Code Signing error messages, its default position is to check the validity of your development or distribution certificate (depending on what kind of code sign operation you were trying to do), check the validity of the AppId and Provisioning Profile, and revoke then reissue whichever part of the signing identity is in error.