DTS regularly receives questions about how to preserve keychain items across an App ID change, and so I thought I’d post a comprehensive answer here for the benefit of all. If you have any questions or comments, or other creative solutions!, please start a new thread here on DevForums, tagging it with Security so that I see it. Share and Enjoy — Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com" App ID Prefix Change and Keychain Access The list of keychain access groups your app can access is determined by three entitlements. For the details, see Sharing Access to Keychain Items Among a Collection of Apps. If your app changes its App ID prefix, this list changes and you’re likely to lose access to existing keychain items. This situation crops up under two circumstances: When you migrate your app from using a unique App ID prefix to using your Team ID as its App ID prefix. When you transfer your app to another team. In both cases you have to plan carefully for this change. If you only learn about the problem after you’ve made the change, consider undoing the change to give you time to come up with a plan before continuing. Note On macOS, the information in this post only applies to the data protection keychain. For more information about the subtleties of the keychain on macOS, see On Mac Keychains. For more about App ID prefix changes, see Technote 2311 Managing Multiple App ID Prefixes and QA1726 Resolving the Potential Loss of Keychain Access warning. Migrate From a Unique App ID Prefix to Your Team ID Historically each app was assigned its own App ID prefix. This is no longer the case. Best practice is for apps to use their Team ID as their App ID prefix. This enables multiple neat features, including keychain item sharing and pasteboard sharing. If you have an app that uses a unique App ID prefix, consider migrating it to use your Team ID. This is a good thing in general, as long as you manage the migration process carefully. Your app’s keychain access group list is built from three entitlements: keychain-access-groups, see Keychain Access Groups Entitlement application-identifier (com.apple.application-identifier on macOS) com.apple.security.application-groups, see App Groups Entitlement IMPORTANT A macOS app can’t use an app group as a keychain access group. The first two depend on the App ID prefix. If that changes, you lose access to any keychain items in those groups. WARNING Think carefully before using the keychain to store secrets that are the only way to access irreplaceable user data. While the keychain is very reliable, there are situations where a keychain item can be lost and it’s bad if it takes the user’s data with it. In some cases losing access to keychain items is not a big deal. For example, if your app uses the keychain to manage a single login credential, losing that is likely to be acceptable. The user can recover by logging in again. In other cases losing access to keychain items is unacceptable. For example, your app might manage access to dozens of different servers, each with unique login credentials. Your users will be grumpy if you require them to log in to all those servers again. In such situations you must carefully plan your migration. The key element here is the third item in the list above, the com.apple.security.application-groups entitlement. An app group is tied to your team, and so your app retains access to the corresponding keychain access group across an App ID change. This suggests the following approach: Release a version of your app that moves keychain items from other keychain access groups to a keychain access group corresponding to an app group. Give your users time to update to this new version, run it, and so move their keychain items. When you’re confident that the bulk of your users have done this, change your App ID prefix. Be wary of the following caveats: This approach won’t work on macOS because macOS apps can’t use an app group as a keychain access group. It’s hard to judge how long to wait at step 2. Transfer Your App to Another Team There is no supported way to maintain access to keychain items across an app transfer. This makes it critical that you plan the transfer carefully. Note The approach described in the previous section doesn’t work in this case because app groups are tied to a team. There are three potential approaches here: Do nothing Do not transfer your app Get creative Do Nothing In this case the user loses all the secrets that your app stored in the keychain. This may be acceptable for certain apps. For example, if your app uses the keychain to manage a single login credential, losing that is likely to be acceptable. The user can recover by logging in again. Do Not Transfer Another option is to not transfer your app. Instead, ship a new version of the app from the new team and have the old app recommend that the user upgrade. There are a number of advantages to this approach. The first is that there’s absolutely no risk of losing any user data. The two apps are completely independent. The second advantage is that the user can install both apps on their device at the same time. This opens up a variety of potential migration paths. For example, you might ship an update to the old app with an export feature that saves the user’s state, including their secrets, to a suitably encrypted file, and then match that with an import facility on the new app. Finally, this approach offers flexible timing. The user can complete their migration at their leisure. However, there are a bunch of clouds to go with these silver linings: Your users might never migrate to the new app. If this is a paid app, or an app with in-app purchase, the user will have to buy things again. You lose the original app’s history, ratings, reviews, and so on. Get Creative Finally, you could attempt something creative. For example, you might: Publish a new version of the app that supports exporting the user’s state, including the secrets. Tell your users to do this, with a deadline. Transfer the app and then, when the deadline expires, publish the new version with an import feature. Frankly, this isn’t very practical. The problem is with step 2: There’s no good way to get all your users to do the export, and if they don’t do it before the deadline there’s no way to do it after.

We have a DriverKit entitlement for our USB driver. We now wish to use this same driver with a variant of our existing application. Of course this application has its own separate App ID and will be published in the App Store alongside our existing application. Will we need to go back to the well and ask Apple for another entitlement?

It is possible to provide new updates for the existing users while not having any more new users download our app by removing the app from sale ?

Hi, after 2 years of not updating my app on appstore i wanted to submit an update for my iOS app which also containts a watch app target. When i try to submit it to upload it i get the following errors: Failed registering bundle identifier The app identifier "(myappBundleID).watchkitapp" cannot be registered to your development team because it is nit available. Change your bundle identifier to a unique string to try again. No Profiles for "(myappBundleID).watchkitapp" were found. Xcode culdn't find any iOS App Store provisining profiles matching "(myappBundleID).watchkitapp" Since i have my app already in store with that bundle identifier i don't know why it can not be registered to my team. Also i don't want to change the bundle identifier because then i can not publish it as update to store.

I removed my application from app store 4 days back. and now I am trying to delete app ID that is associated with it, but I am getting error as below: "your app ID "xyz" appears to be in use by the app store, so it can not be removed at this time" how can I resolve this and delete app ID successfully?

Hi all, I am developing new things on my existing .Net core application. I want to create a new page and with this page, the users will create a new app and write important informations. But I cant create a new app with sending post request with connect API. Here is my Postman requests and body. Sending request to : https://api.appstoreconnect.apple.com/v1/apps Body : { "data": { "type": "apps", "attributes": { "bundleId": "com.test.testtest", "name": "Test Test", "primaryLocale": "en-US", "sku": "test2024", "platform": "IOS" } } } Also I am using a bearer token, and this token has a admin role. When I send a post request, I am getting below error. { "errors": [ { "id": "35f9631f-b8d8-408c-8dfd-adaef043d062", "status": "403", "code": "FORBIDDEN_ERROR", "title": "The given operation is not allowed", "detail": "The resource 'apps' does not allow 'CREATE'. Allowed operations are: GET_COLLECTION, GET_INSTANCE, UPDATE" } ] } How can I fix this. Pls help. Thanks.

We're going to change and start building our Apps with a new DUNS and Apple account. Is there a possibility to reuse the bundle id and make sure the customers will only download a new version of the same App it's published already in prod stores?

At the beginning of the year, I transferred 3 applications from one account to another. Last month, I had to make changes and update two of them without any issues. Now, I need to update the third one, but in Xcode, I'm getting an error saying that the identifier can't be registered to my development team because it's not available. In App Store Connect, I can see all 3 applications perfectly. I have regenerated the certificates, but this third one is not appearing in the provisioning profiles. Any help?

Hey guys! Please, its not possible to remove or reuse an identifier (new app by removing the old one) through the developer portal? https://developer.apple.com/account/resources/identifiers/list Everytime we try to remove there is a message we can't: There is a problem with the request entity The App ID 'xxxxxxxxxxx' appears to be in use by the App Store, so it can not be removed at this time. But the app has been removed!!! Does anyone knows how to delete/reuse an identifier by doing some action in the portal? NOTE: we are low code - no Xcode (yes, so poor) Thank u guys!

Hi how to resolve below issue, I can't update my application to app store connector AppsService: ResponseErrors (1): Error status: 403, code: FORBIDDEN.OFAC_UNCLEARED, title: 'This Apple ID has not been cleared by sanctions.', detail: 'This Apple ID has not been cleared by sanctions, so it cannot access this page.', id: CBISLAII7FNFDDT2A55TPQVC7I

I'm new one and I would like to publish apps I created for my clients on Apple Store. I have DUNS number for my company. What i read is not possible to push app with my dev account, for my clients because "the app content must be relative to the account name" This means that each client must have its own apple dev account? This seems frustrating for them... So I kindly ask you: I'm an app developer can i publish app for my client with my account? Of course the professional job of my client is different from my job... could this be a problem of validation? If I can, can I use individual account or company account? Last: it's ok if the property of my client's app will be the mine, and displayed as mine on the apple store. Thanks to all for clarification my dubts :)

I want to develop a very basic app for my wife. Since I'm into Windows and Android, I don't have any experience with MacOS. My wife is visually impaired and chose for an iPhone, and never switched since. I want to buy a cheap second hand MacBook Pro 2011 to be able to compile. Found this one online. Is it good enough? It doesn't matter if it's slow or has some weird glitches. Only thing I want is develop the app, install it, and then let the MacBook rest for the rest of its live (sorry for this sad story MacBook-lovers :)) [Image Edited by Moderator to Remove Serial Number]

I've got the error about the 10 app maximum limit in 7 days. But I don't get it, first: I only ran one app in my phone(if knew about this, probably would've been a little bit more careful), second: it's been a month and I still get the error. Sorry if it's dumb but I'm new in this whole coding thing.

Hi , I'm facing below mentioned issue while uploading the app using transporter , anyone please help on this.

Searching for insight on the best and most compliant way to essentially merge two apps. They have the same functionality but one is much more advanced than the other, although the legacy app has a higher user count. Instead of letting both run, we want to push the legacy app an update with the code from the new app and ultimately kill the newer one. What is the best way to do this? Is it allowed to simply push the source code from new app to legacy and update the identifier? We do not wan't to break any app store rules and want to limit the potential of losing users by forcing them to download a new app.

Dear guys, I am planning to take over the application from an organization that has been published in the Store already. Because their organization will be not available anymore (failure), I will take over that application and continue to develop with new updates. Therefore, Could the organization hand over to me all of the accounts, bills, and permissions that I will use later for the release new updated version? I want to continue to develop this app as an individual program. Is it possible? During developing for new version, I want to deactivate the application on Store, and then I will reactivate it when it's done later. Is it possible? Because I want to keep the current users, and data to continue this production. If I'm missing any steps or requirements, please helo to guide me. Thanks you.