App in production when Distribution Certificate expires

Expo Application Services (EAS)
1

In prepping an app for a build using EAS, I noticed the following section pertaining to the Distribution Certificate:

If this certificate expires, your apps in production will not be affected. However, you will need to generate a new certificate if you want to upload new apps to the App Store or update any of your existing apps. Deleting a distribution certificate has no effect on any apps already on the App Store.

And this, pertaining to the app Provisioning Profile:

Each profile is app-specific, meaning you will have a provisioning profile for every app you submit to the App Store. These provisioning profiles are associated with your distribution certificate, so if that is revoked or expired, you’ll need to regenerate the app’s provisioning profile, as well. Similar to the distribution certificate, revoking your app’s provisioning profile will not have any effect on apps already on the App Store.

Up until now I thought we were running up against a hard deadline, but this makes me think that the current app in production won’t stop working when the Distribution Certificate expires, we just won’t be able to upload any new apps, or updates to existing apps, until this is updated.

So just to be clear, in a situation where an app is associated with an Apple Development Program Membership, which ours is, what will happen to the existing production app when the current Distribution Certificate expires? To be clear we use “internal” for “distribution”, and “universal” for “enterpriseProvisioning”, and was built with expo build. Based on what I’m reading above it sounds like perhaps the app won’t stop working after all? We have the new version ready to go, but I’d prefer a longer testing period, and if this is the case, this would allow for that.

2

Note that quotes you are referring to are about App Store, if you are distributing your app via it you do not have to do anything, cert expiry will not affect you in any way.

But if you have an enterprise account and distribute your app outside of the App Store, those apps will stop working (at most few days after expiry)

To be clear we use “internal” for “distribution”, and “universal” for “enterpriseProvisioning”,

Based on that I’m assuming that you have an Enterprise account, and don’t use App Store at all, is that correct? If that is the case you need to update your app.

3

Yes, thanks, I had determined that after doing a little more research. What I described above only applies with App Store submissions. Okay, thanks for clarifying.