App credentials

Learn about what app credentials Android and iOS require.

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Expo automates the process of signing your app for Android and iOS, but in both cases, you can choose to provide your overrides. EAS Build can generate signed or unsigned applications, but to distribute your application through the stores, it must be a signed application.

On this page, you'll learn about the credentials that each platform requires. If you're curious about how we store your credentials on our end, take a look at our security documentation.

Android

Google requires all Android apps to be digitally signed with a certificate before they are installed on a device or updated. Usually, a private key and its public certificate are stored in a keystore. In the past, APKs uploaded to the store were required to be signed with the app signing certificate (a certificate that will be attached to the app in the Play Store), and if the keystore was lost there was no way to recover or reset it. Now, you can opt-in to App Signing by Google Play and simply upload an APK signed with an upload certificate, and Google Play will automatically replace it with the app signing certificate. Both the old method (app signing certificate) and new method (upload certificate) are essentially the same mechanisms, but using the new method, if your upload keystore is lost or compromised, you can contact the Google Play support team to reset the key.

From the Expo build process's perspective, there is no difference between whether an app is signed with an upload certificate or an app signing key. Either way, eas build will generate an .apk or .aab signed with the keystore currently associated with your application. If you want to generate an upload keystore manually, you can do that the same way you created your original keystore.

See here to find more information about this process.

App signing by Google Play

When you upload your first release to Google Play you will see a notice about "App signing by Google Play" and "Google is protecting your app signing key". This is the default behavior and requires no action on your behalf except to press "Continue".

If you lose your upload keystore (or it's compromised), you must ask the Google Support Team to reset your upload key.

If you currently manage your app signing key and want Google to manage it for you, see Use app signing by Google Play.

iOS

The 3 primary iOS credentials, all of which are associated with your Apple Developer account, are:

• Distribution Certificate
• Provisioning Profiles
• Push Notification Keys

Whether you let EAS handle all your credentials, or you handle them yourself, it can be valuable to understand what each of these credentials means, when and where they're used, and what happens when they expire or are revoked. You can inspect and manage all your credentials with EAS CLI by running eas credentials.

Distribution Certificate

The distribution certificate is all about you, the developer, and not about any particular app. You may only have one distribution certificate associated with your Apple Developer account. This certificate will be used for all of your apps. 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. You can clear the distribution certificate Expo currently has stored for your app the next time you build by running eas credentials and following the prompts.

Push Notification Keys

Apple Push Notification Keys (often abbreviated as APN keys) allow the associated apps to send and receive push notifications.

You can have a maximum of 2 APN keys associated with your Apple Developer account, and a single key can be used with any number of apps. If you revoke an APN key, all apps that rely on that key will no longer be able to send or receive push notifications until you upload a new key to replace it. Uploading a new APN key will not change your users' Expo Push Tokens. Push notification keys do not expire. You can clear the APN key Expo currently has stored for your app by running eas credentials and following the prompts.

APN keys created by Expo can be downloaded on the Expo website.

Provisioning Profiles

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.

Provisioning profiles expire after 12 months, but this won't affect apps in production. You will just need to create a new one the next time you build your app by running eas build -p ios, or manually with eas credentials.

Summary

Clearing Credentials

When you use the eas credentials command to delete your credentials, this only removes those credentials from Expo's servers, it does not delete the credentials from Apple's perspective. This means that to fully delete your credentials (for example, if you want a new push notification key, however, you already have two), you'll need to do so from the Apple Developer Console.

Re-signing new credentials

You can use eas build:resign to codesign an existing .ipa for iOS to a new ad hoc provisioning profile. This helps reduce time when distributing internally — for example, if you want to add a new test device to an existing build, you can use this command to update the provisioning profile to include the device without rebuilding the entire app from scratch.

Running the command will ask you to select a build that you want to re-sign. For example, running the command in an example project shows an available build:

After selecting the build, follow the steps to log in to your Apple Developer account. When prompted Show devices and ask me again, you can select a new provisioning profile.

Select a new device, and the command will run the EAS Build again. Note that the build triggered this time reuses the application artifact from the selected build and codesigns it with the new provisioning profile. Once the process of codesigning is complete, you can use this new build link to install the .ipa on the iOS device that was added to the provisioning profile during the process.