No iOS Development certificates found

Question

I got a strange error in my Xcode organizer when I want to update my Provisioning profiles.

Xcode says this:

"No iOS Development certificate was found. However, there is already a certificate request pending. An Agent or Admin must approve this request before you can download your certificate."

I never experienced this before so if someone got an explanation and maybe a solution, it could be nice :).

I check on the provisioning page in the developer zone on the Apple website but I don't find something that could be broken :/

Answer 1

The trick that did it for me was to log into developer.apple.com and manually create a dev certificate and then manually create a provisioning profile. I have only one team with only one member (me) so there was no way for me to approve a certificate. When I tried to do it automatically through the Xcode organizer, the error just persisted.

Answer 2

Same error message here. Seems to have multiple sources. Mine was that I have a developer account and joining two teams. In one team i had no Certificates at all. In the past this did not cause any problems. In Xcode Organizer I could choose which team I try to fetch the Provisioning Profiles. And if chose the team for which I had Development Certificate the Provisioning Profiles got downloaded with no error. I think, with the new improved Member Center starting from april 2013 the Organizer fetches automatically all team accounts - without asking for a specific team. As one team had no certificate at all, the process of fetching for all teams stop with this error message.

Solution (for this problem) is to add a Development Certificate for ALL teams.

Answer 3

Having just gone through this myself, I highly recommend you contact Apple Developer Program Support and have them walk you through the process of resetting your certificates and profiles. It is not a difficult thing to do manually, but there are lots of ways to muck it up (I speak from experience) AND the more people that call the more likely they are to continue improving the process.

That said, the short(-ish) answer is to delete all of your developer and installer certificates from Keychain, then delete all certificates and provisioning profiles from the portal, then create them all again from scratch, and then refresh Xcode to bring them all in.

Oh, and be sure to back it all up when you're done!

Answer 4

I got the same issue, and solved it by clicking my team under "Teams" in organiser. I only have one team there atm, and didn't expect that to have any impact, but it forced a reload of the profiles or so, and now it works. Hth.

Answer 5

My situation was that I got this message when trying to refresh my old certificates (developer + distribution) from Xcode, when they had expired due to the yearly renewal of the developer program.

For what it's worth, I managed to fix the problem by this procedure (roughly):

1. Delete my old "iOS Team Provisioning Profile" from my device
2. Open my keychain and delete the old private keys associated with with the expired certificates.
3. Remove the expired certificates from the list in Xcode's organizer (on the portal, they were deleted already).
4. Generate new certificates manually on the portal, following the instructions in detail (including downloading the new certificates and double-click to install).
5. After trying a new refresh in Xcode's organizer, I still got the same error message, but when checking on the device, a new provisioning profile had now been automatically created and installed, so I could forget about the error message.

Answer 6

You have developer access in apple developer profile. Please ask admin to approve your certificate request.When admin/agent will approve then automatically that error will be removed.

Answer 7

As the message says you need to log into developer.apple.com site and approve the certificate request.

If you are not the agent for your account, then you will need to get the agent to approve the request.

Answer 8

Oddly all it took for me was:

First do an export (just to be safe!)

Xcode 5:

• In Xcode -> Preferences -> Accounts
• Click the cog icon at the bottom left -> Export Accounts...
• Enter a filename and password and save
• Ideally, then back it up somewhere that's not your Mac (Dropbox for example) - it is encrypted so that's okay.

Then for the actual fix:

Xcode 5:

• In Xcode -> Preferences -> Accounts
• Select the Apple ID in the left column
• Click the "-" (minus) icon at the bottom left and conf
• Click the "+" (plus) icon at the bottom left -> Apple ID... and login

Everything was then just fine...

Answer 9

In Xcode: Menu Xcode --> Preferences --> Accounts --> View Details

Then press the refresh button in the lower left corner.

Answer 10

I got a slightly different message recently Nov-2021 using xcode 13.x . The message was "ios_develop.cer file not found" when I was trying to "Build" the project, even though the file was there although it was expired. I was not surprised, I hadn't built this solution for years. I do renew my Apple developer subscription every year. My son took a very old school solution to fix this that I wanted to mention in case it helps anyone. Apple tools like "Manage Certificates" wouldn't let me delete the old certificate so we deleted the certificate in File Manager and generated some new ones, but we couldn't get xcode past the "file not found" message, even with certificates created in xcode "Manage Certificates". Then my son copied the new Developer cert to the location it was looking for and renamed it to exactly the name it was looking for. Xcode then started to fuss about permissions on the new cert which we fixed in Get Info, Properties "Allow Access to All" both the public and private cert. I really thought there was zero chance this would work but go figure, all the sudden the old xcode project fully Built and we were able to place the iPhone executable on iPhones that were in the provisioning list. Refreshing that such an old style approach (placing a file where it was looked for) worked so well. Now that Apple sees that this works they will probably check to see the cert was provided only through their tools, but it should work for a while.

Answer 11

I have the same problem. There is indeed nothing to approve, the status of my certificates is issued, if there would be a need for provenance there would be a button to do so. To be able to continue working I just deleted the "Xcode managed" profile, created a new one, downloaded it (not using Xcode) and throw it into Organizer.

Answer 12

I met the same problem with an Apple ID account (admin) with two Team. Once I remove my account from one of the team, that message never bother me anymore. But in this case, if I want to refresh all provision profiles using two distinct account. Hope this will help.

Answer 13

Just download the provision files manually solved the problem for me.

Answer 14

I was able to solve this issue for myself by discovering I had a couple of CSR's that I hadn't completed. Both files had the extension .certSigningRequest and had been produced through the Member Center (not Xcode). But I had not completed the upload and certificate generation, which is what Xcode was complaining about when it said "However, there is already a certificate request pending.". Once I completed those steps the problem went away.