iOS Renewal Process

You would think that renewing your development membership would be all that you need to do on a yearly basis to keep working as an Apple developer.
It should be just: pay the fee and keep on developing. Unfortunately it is not that simple.

Your certificates and provisioning profiles need to be renewed, regenerated, and installed before you can continue. As I have not found a reasonable walk-through for this process, either from Apple or on their forums, I will quickly sketch it out here:


1) Clear out your old Provisioning profiles in Xcode

Open the XCode Organizer. Select "Provisioning Profiles," go through the list and delete all the expired certificates.


2) Remove your existing certificates in Keychain Access

Open the Utilities fold in your Mac's Applications. Open Keychain Access and then select "My Certificates." You will see your expired certificates (Dev and Dist) listed. Remove them both.


3) Create new certificates

Keeping Keychain Access open, click:
Keychain Access>Certificate Assistant>Request a Certifcate From a Certificate Authority.
Choose "Save to Disk" and save the request file.

Open the Certificates section of the iOS Provisioning Portal.

Delete the existing Development Certificate.
Click the "+" Symbol to create a new development certificate.
Select the top option "iOS App Development"
Click Continue.
Upload the certificate request file you created and finish.

Click "+" again to create a distribution certificate.
Choose the "App Store and Ad Hoc" option and continue.
Upload the certificate request file and finish.


 4) Regenerate the Provisioning Profiles

Click the "Provisioning Profiles" in the iOS Provisioning Portal.
Go through each of your development and distribution profiles and edit them.
When you edit them you will see an option to select the new certificate that you generated. Once selected the "Generate" button will become active, click to generate and download the new profiles.


 5) Install the Certificates and Provisioning Profiles
 
Install the downloaded certificates and provisioning profiles by dragging them into Keychain Access and XCode respectively.

You can now test your development apps and distribute them to the app store just like before you renewed. Just remember to select the correct profile when you are building your app.

App Distribution Key File Backup

I have been developing apps using Appcelerator's Titanium Studio for the past year. Unlike some of the other multiple OS distribution methods Appcelerator allows you to generate native controls and widgets across multiple platforms. They have a strong user community and the stability of the apps produced is excellent (contrary to the negative reviews found online).

In my standard backup process I create regular copies of the code base for my apps. However, it has come to my attention that for the sake of security you need to back up more than just your code.

When you distribute apps to the app stores, they need to be signed used using the private keys associated with your development certificates. If these keys are lost then you will be unable to publish updates to your apps.

So if you develop for Android and iOS as I do, here are a couple of links that give you the critical information.

iOS
Read this post on backing up your private key and follow the instructions at the bottom.

Android
For android releases to Google Play, you need to make a back up of the keystore you created with keytool. This is the android guide to application signing. You will have used the keytool command to create a key for your application before distributing, as described in this how-to. You simply make a back-up of the file listed when you run the command
keytool -list -v -keystore /XXXXXXX