Uploading Binary iPhone App “The signature was invalid” again again and again

Question

I\'m going crazy! I\'m trying to upload the binary of my first application but I have always the same error! \"The binary you uploaded was invalid. The signature was invalid

Answer 1

It seems like there are a LOT of causes for receiving this cryptic and mostly unhelpful email. Even after verifying the use of distribution certificates, cleaning & rebuilding my project, and checking with codesign from the command line (and following instructions from the email), no errors showed up—-but I'd get the "invalid signature" email right after uploading. All the solutions seem anecdotal and obviously depend on what secret error is causing the problem. I've spent the last week pulling my hair out, trying to figure it out for my app—-and finally got it successfully submitted today—so let me share my story and see if it's relevant to your situation.

In my case, I seemed to have a complex cause of having my Entitlement.plist set with an incorrect variable along with the holdover of an old provisioning profile (from a previous Xcode version?) buried deep in the project.pbxproj component of my Xcode project file.

The "aps-environment" variable in my Entitlements.plist was set to "distribution" instead of "production" (I swear I read somewhere in the developer docs that it was supposed to be "distribution"!) But fixing that alone wasn't enough to get my app through. (I must have submitted 100 different combinations of app configurations trying different variables!) Starting with the helpful suggestions from this post on another forum, I dug through the distribution profile and found duplicate entries for some variables. The duplicates had empty quotation marks (i.e. nothing set for the variable) or strange variables or old provisioning profiles which seemed to be causing problems (somehow). Cleaning this up and removing the duplicate lines with bad variables worked in my case. YMMV. But carefully examining the project files ("show contents" on the Xcode project file in finder) seems like a good idea for diagnostics. Good luck!