Clarification about Different type of certificates.

With regards your Mac product, are you planning to ship outside of the App Store? If so, you’ll need Developer ID signing identities and that complicates things somewhat. Let me know if that’s the case and we can discuss the details.

If not, then all your products will ship via the App Store and thus the only signing identities you need are Apple Development (for day-to-day developer) and Apple Distribution (for submission to the App Store).

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Is there any downside to continue using iOS Distribution vs Apple Distribution if you're only targeting the iOS platform?

Not that I’m aware of. I certainly wouldn’t spend a bunch of time transitioning from the former to the latter. However, Apple Distribution is the way forward, so if you are making changes to your signing setup for other reasons, you should take that opportunity to make this change as well.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Actually there is a huge difference in the new and the old certificates. Apple jinxed it again again.

I'm developing an app that is connection to a device via WIFI without internet connection. The initial development was done on Xcode 13.1 and an iOS14 iPad. That worked well. As usual the iPad needed to be on a WIFI with internet connection at the first launch to verify the code signing. After that it was fine to launch the app from Xcode to the iPad while it being on the WIFI without internet connection. The app didn't need any additional code signing verification.

After updating the iPad to iOS15 every launch started to fail with the error unverified when the iPad was on WIFI without internet connection. Launching on the iPAD on WIFI with internet connection was fine. It seems like iOS15 causes apps to verify code signing on every launch - not only the first any more.

After searching and fiddling with Provisioning Profiles for several days I found out that Apple now has two different types of certificates - an "iOS Development" certificate and a "Apple development" certificate. The latter being the "new" thing. Deleting my automatically created certificate and creating a "new" - and then a new provisioning profile solved my problems. My app now only needs to verify code signing at the first launch.

This difference (and the change in iOS15) should definitely be more obvious - or even better: not have been an issue by making the certificates compatible.