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Managing App Signing Certificates

App signing certificates are used to sign a particular build of an app, on either Android or iOS/watchOS, to show that the app has been created by a particular company or developer. Any modified or otherwise tampered version of the app cannot be correctly signed with that certificate. Approov uses this information to confirm that a particular app has indeed been officially created. Thus it is necessary to add signing certificates to the Approov account to show what signing identities should be officially recognized. Approov only needs the form of the certificate containing the public key to perform a verification. Since the private key is not uploaded there is no risk associated with the addition of the certificate to the Approov account in this way. An option is provided called "auto registration" and, if this is applied, then all apps signed with that certificate are effectively registered automatically and there is no need to use per-app registration at all.

📄️Auto Registration

It is possible to add an individual app signing certificate with auto-registration, simply by using the -autoReg option when adding the certificate. If this property is added for a particular certificate then this means that any app that is signed with it will be automatically registered and there is no need to add a specific registration for it, as detailed in Managing Registrations. This makes it easier to develop and debug using Approov, and also means that the process of releasing new app versions to the app store is easier as there is no Approov registration step required.