Getting Error when trying to Push Publish an Apple Push Notification (APN) Certificate

Overview

During rebuilding, renewing, or recreating the Apple Push Notification (APN) Service Certificate, you are getting one of the following errors:

• Cert Error
• Certificate Error
• Apple Auth Error: You already have 2 active push profiles for this application/ environment. You'll need to revoke an old certificate to make room for a new one.

Solution

This can be fixed by revoking an older push service certificate in the Developer Console, or by checking for pending license agreements is the App Store Connect portal.

Some possible causes of these certificate errors are: 

• There is more than one Apple Push Service Certificate in the Apple Developer Account.
• The Bundle ID does not match the one in the CMS.
• There is a pending Apple license agreement, that you have to agree to.

The Bundle ID represents the app's unique identifier that you can register, modify, and delete. To solve this issue, you should first verify the Bundle ID from the App Store Connect; after that, you need to revoke the older certificates from the Apple Developer Console.

Verify the Bundle ID

1. Log in to the App Store Connect.

2. If there is a pending license agreement you will see the message "The updated Apple Developer Program License Agreement needs to be reviewed." Be sure to accept the agreement before continuing. 
   

   

3. Go to My Apps 

4. Select the app that has push notification issues and select the tab that says App Information.

    

5. Copy this Bundle ID to a text editor as it will be required to search for the certificates, and will be used to verify the Bundle ID in the CMS.

Revoke the Certificate

1. Go to the Apple Developer Console.

2. Go to Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles.

   

3. If there are many apps listed, search for the certificate using the Bundle ID.
   
   

4. From the Apple Push Services certificates displayed for the Bundle ID, select the certificate with the oldest expiration date.
   
   

5. Click Revoke.
   
   

6. If there are more than two certificates, repeat the above process until there is only one certificate (the newest one) left.

If the issue persists, you can try republishing the app's iOS version if it was last published at least 6 months back. As noted in our article When Do I Need To Republish An App?, we recommend republishing apps every 3-6 months. Republishing an iOS app recreates its Push Notification Certificate and helps resolve push notification issues too.

Note: If you are still experiencing issues and the Apple Developer ID for the particular app is registered as an Organization kindly add our Apple ID (iosuploads101@gmail.com) as an Admin or App Manager with access to Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles.

This will allow us to check inside the account and perform the requested operation(s). 

Please see Add, edit, and delete users, for further instructions to add our Apple ID as an Admin or App Manager

Testing

Run Push Publish again. The push notifications should now work without any error.

1. Go to My Apps.

2. Click the Options Menu of the App that you had the problem with.

3. Click More > Push Publish. 

   
   
   
4. Fill in the required details and verify the Bundle ID. Replace it with the one you noted in the text editor if it does not match. 
   
   
   
   
5. Click Submit at the bottom of the page.

The following message should display on the top of the interface:

Push certificate generated!

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