Bypassing iOS application verification error

March 31, 2019 1 minute read

Sometimes, when you’d like to install a third-party iOS app outside of the App Store on your device you might come across with «Application Verification Failed» error.

It can be a rare case, because it’s really a concatenation of circumstances and means, that you received the app without your team’s provision profile. Anyways, we are able to solve this problem.

Plan

Get own provisioning profile
Resign the app
Install the app

Precondition

First of all, to make our life better and easier, we should install ideviceinstaller and fastlane:

brew install ideviceinstaller
gem install fastlane

Provisioning profile

Then we need to get a provision profile. If you already have it, you can jump to the next step, if not, let’s go on.

As Apple said:

Xcode is the easiest way to create an iOS provisioning profile. Connect your device to your Mac and click Use for Development in Xcode’s Organizer window. Sign in with the Apple ID associated with your Apple Developer Program membership and Xcode will generate a provisioning profile containing your certificate and device identifier.

So, in this case it doesn’t matter of signing type, will it be personal team or organisation team.

Resign the app

Here we need three things:

.ipa
.mobileprovision
iOS Developer Certificate

I hope you have got an .ipa, other ones we can get from Xcode:

So:

drag and drop iOS Team Provisioning Profile from Xcode tooltip into the folder with .ipa
copy iPhone Developer Certificate from the same tooltip
then resign the app via fastlane like this:

fastlane sigh resign testapp.ipa --signing_identity "iPhone Developer: [email protected] (KJRTP5GJS9)" -p "test.mobileprovision"

Install the app

Success

P.S.:

If you see this pop-up, you can go to Settings => General => Device Management on the device to trust the developer and allow the app to be run (see Apple documentation for more information):