Provisioning Profiles was invalid but Certificate and App ID are valid, why is that

Question

My provisioning profile suddenly became invalid. I logged in developer.apple.com couples of days ago and everything was fine. Today I logged in again and was surprised to find that both of my development profile and distribution profile were invalid. The certificates and App ID are valid, I did not revoke any of them and they are not expired at all. So why my profile became invalid?

I know I can re-generate profile but because I do enterprises distribution not app store distribution. I am worried that regenerating profile may affect current users. Also, I really need to figure out the reason to prevent it from happening again.

Any idea? Thanks!

Updated: First of all, it is not because the profiles were expired, their expiration date is at the end of 2015.

Second, I did re-generate development profile at morning but I just checked it and found the profile was invalid again! Something weird must happen and I have submitted a support ticket to apple and wait for their response.

Answer 1

I'm curious to see what Apple support says. According to Apple (https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/qa/qa1878/_index.html) :

Q: What causes the provisioning profile "Invalid" status? How do I resolve it, and how do I prevent it?

A: The provisioning profile invalid status is caused by changes to the profile’s associated certificate or App ID. Any time an App ID or certificate changes, all profiles that are associated to it are marked Invalid. This does not apply to Xcode's team profiles, but applies to all profiles that Xcode does not manage, specifically, custom development profiles and distribution profiles. This document explains the causes in detail and provides steps to resolve and avoid the profile invalid status.

One possibility is that you modified the app id by turning on or off services in Xcode:

Avoidance

Since Xcode started managing services on App IDs (through the Xcode > Target > Capabilities tab), Invalidating provisioning profiles became as easy as enabling or disabling a target capability. Remember that every time the App ID changes with respect to its enabled services, all profiles attached to that ID become invalid.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

It seems that somebody still hits this problem after almost a year when I first raised it. So I am answering my own question trying to provide some insight.

Apple never answered my ticket instead they returned my credit. I took that as a sign that they had no idea either (saw my comments above). I can still use that "invalid" profile but it really made me uncomfortable. So I created a different one.

In summary it maybe just a bug in their system and if you have tried all the solutions and the problem still exists just create a new one.