iOS - Creating a Distribution Certificate and .p12 File

A distribution certificate identifies your team/organization within a distribution provisioning profile and allows you to submit your app to the Apple App Store.

A .p12 file contains the certificates Apple needs in order to build and publish apps.

The steps below will guide you through the process of creating an iOS Distribution Certificate and .p12 file. To read more about certificates and how they work in Apple's App Store, please visit the iOS Dev Center and consult the official Apple documentation.

Note: These steps must be done on a Mac that you will use to submit and publish your apps to the Apple App Store. While you can transfer access to another Mac computer, we recommend following these steps on the actual machine you will use to submit apps.

Before You Begin

• Identify which Mac you will use to submit apps to the Apple App Store
• Be sure to sign-up for an iOS Developer Account
• Make sure you have created an App ID in iTunes Connect (for more information, read the article "iOS - Creating an App ID.")

How to Create a Distribution Certificate

1. On your Mac go to the folder Applications > Utilities and open Keychain Access.

2. Go to Keychain Access > Certificate Assistant > Request a Certificate from a Certificate Authority.

3. Fill out the information in the Certificate Information window as specified below and click "Continue.".

• In the User Email Address field, enter the email address to identify with this certificate
• In the Common Name field, enter your name
• In the Request group, click the "Saved to disk" option

4. Save the file to your hard drive.

The assistant creates a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) file which contains a public/private key pair.

5. To login into the iOS Developer Console https://developer.apple.com

 

6. Click "Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles."

 

7. Go to Certificates and click on the "+" button to add a new certificate.

8. Select "App Store and Ad Hoc" from the Production options and click "Continue."

Note: To use your certificates, you must have the intermediate signing certificate in your OS X system keychain. This is automatically installed by Xcode. However, if you need to reinstall the intermediate signing certificate click the link at the bottom of the page.

9. Click on "Continue" again.

You created your CSR file in the previous steps, so there's no need to create another one.

10. Click on "Choose File" and select the CSR file you created previously and then click on "Continue."

11. Click on the "Download" button to download a .cer file to your machine and then click "Done."

12. Double-click the .cer file to install it in Keychain Access.

It will have the name "iPhone Distribution <firstname> <lastname>" and will expire one year from today's date.

How to Export a Distribution Certificate as a .p12 File

A .p12 file is a specially-formatted and encrypted file that contains your distribution certificate. It's embedded by the mag+ Publishing portal when building your app. iTunes Connect checks for this file when you submit an app and will only accept the app if it contains a .p12 file that matches what you have configured in your iTunes Connect account.

1. On your Mac, launch Keychain Access, select the certificate entry and right-click on it to select "Export."

All certificates you have installed will be in the "login" keychain (Label 1) under the category "My Certificates" (Label 2).

2. In the window that appears, make sure the File Format is set to "Personal Information Exchange (.p12)" and click on "Save" to save it to your machine.

3. When asked for a password, leave it blank and click on "Ok."

4. When asked for the computer password, enter it and click on "Allow."

5. Your .p12 file will be saved in the location you specified.

6. Login to the mag+ Publish portal  and go to Apps > iOS > Certificate and Provisioning Files.

7. Click on "Choose File" under the Distribution Certificate heading, select your distribution certificate, and click on "Save."

App Creation: Next Steps

Creating distribution certificates and .p12 files is only one step in creating an iOS app for distribution. Please refer to the additional articles in this section for information on setting up provisioning profiles and configuring in-app purchases. These items correspond to settings in the mag+ Publish portal. The portal will actually build your customized iOS app. You will then upload this app to the Apple App Store or to your own internal distribution servers (for enterprise customers only). 

Source: iOS - Creating a Distribution Certificate and .p12 File – Mag+ Designd Support (magplus.com)

How to Install Android App Bundles (aab) on Android?

Based on: How to Install APKs (App Bundle) on Android? (2023) (digitbin.com)

1. Download .jar file from here Releases · google/bundletool (github.com)

2. In command line: 

java -jar bundletool.jar build-apks --bundle=app_name.aab --output=app_name.apks --mode=universal

2a. To sighn with the related kesystore file:

java -jar bundletool.jar build-apks --bundle=app_name.aab --output=app_name.apks --mode=universal --ks="path_to_the_kestore\Kestore_Alias.keystore" --ks-key-alias=Kestore_Alias

3. Rename app_name.apks to app_name.zip and extract universal.apk

4. Copy to your device and install.

Rating of the programming languages (TIOBE Index)

TIOBE Index for December 2021

December Headline: Will C# become the programming language of 2021?

Next month, the TIOBE programming language of the year will be announced. This award is given to the programming language that has had the highest increase in ratings in 2021. At the moment, C# is by far the most likely candidate for this title. It is interesting to note that C# has never won the "TIOBE index programming language of the year award" during its 21 years of existence, although it has been in the top 10 for the last 2 decades. Let's see what happens next month! Other interesting moves in the TIOBE index this month are Swift (from #14 to #10), R (from #15 to #11), and Kotlin (from #33 to #26). -- Paul Jansen CEO TIOBE Software

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

Dec 2021	Dec 2020	Change	Programming Language		Ratings	Change
1	3			Python	12.90%	+0.69%
2	1			C	11.80%	-4.69%
3	2			Java	10.12%	-2.41%
4	4			C++	7.73%	+0.82%
5	5			C#	6.40%	+2.21%
6	6			Visual Basic	5.40%	+1.48%
7	7			JavaScript	2.30%	-0.06%
8	12			Assembly language	2.25%	+0.91%
9	10			SQL	1.79%	+0.26%
10	13			Swift	1.76%	+0.54%
11	9			R	1.58%	-0.01%
12	8			PHP	1.50%	-0.62%
13	23			Classic Visual Basic	1.27%	+0.56%
14	11			Groovy	1.23%	-0.30%
15	15			Ruby	1.16%	-0.01%
16	18			Delphi/Object Pascal	1.14%	+0.27%
17	32			Fortran	1.04%	+0.59%
18	14			Perl	0.96%	-0.24%
19	16			Go	0.95%	-0.19%
20	17			MATLAB	0.92%	-0.18%

TIOBE Programming Community IndexSource: www.tiobe.com

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Other programming languages

The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. This overview is published unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed a language. If you have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us at tpci@tiobe.com. Please also check the overview of all programming languages that we monitor.

Position	Programming Language	Ratings
21	SAS	0.86%
22	(Visual) FoxPro	0.82%
23	COBOL	0.68%
24	Scratch	0.60%
25	Prolog	0.60%
26	Kotlin	0.57%
27	Rust	0.45%
28	PL/SQL	0.43%
29	Objective-C	0.42%
30	Ada	0.41%
31	Lisp	0.41%
32	Lua	0.40%
33	Scala	0.30%
34	VBScript	0.28%
35	Julia	0.27%
36	Logo	0.26%
37	Dart	0.26%
38	D	0.24%
39	ABAP	0.22%
40	PowerShell	0.22%
41	TypeScript	0.21%
42	RPG	0.20%
43	Ladder Logic	0.19%
44	ML	0.18%
45	Apex	0.18%
46	Haskell	0.18%
47	LabVIEW	0.17%
48	Awk	0.16%
49	Verilog	0.16%
50	Tcl	0.16%

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The Next 50 Programming Languages

The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).

• ABC, ActionScript, Alice, APL, B4X, Ballerina, Bash, Boo, Bourne shell, C shell, CFML, Clipper, CLIPS, Clojure, Curl, Eiffel, Erlang, F#, Factor, Haxe, Icon, Inform, Io, J#, JScript, Korn shell, Lingo, LiveCode, M4, MQL4, NATURAL, Nim, NXT-G, OCaml, Occam, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, PostScript, Q, Racket, REXX, Ring, Scheme, SPARK, SPSS, Transact-SQL, Vala/Genie, VHDL, XSLT, Zig

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This Month's Changes in the Index

This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:

• David Heurtevent suggested to add the term "WASM" to the WebAssembly language. Thanks a lot David.
• There are lots of mails that still need to be processed. As soon as there is more time available your mail will be answered. Please be patient.

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Very Long Term History

To see the bigger picture, please find below the positions of the top 10 programming languages of many years back. Please note that these are average positions for a period of 12 months.

Programming Language	2021	2016	2011	2006	2001	1996	1991	1986
C	1	2	2	2	1	1	1	1
Python	2	5	7	8	20	27	-	-
Java	3	1	1	1	2	15	-	-
C++	4	3	3	3	3	2	2	5
C#	5	4	4	7	11	-	-	-
Visual Basic	6	13	-	-	-	-	-	-
JavaScript	7	7	10	10	9	20	-	-
PHP	8	6	5	5	10	-	-	-
Assembly language	9	10	-	-	-	-	-	-
SQL	10	-	-	-	35	-	-	-
Fortran	20	26	29	21	25	7	3	8
Ada	28	30	17	17	18	11	4	2
Lisp	32	27	13	13	16	8	7	3
(Visual) Basic	-	-	8	4	4	3	8	6

There are 2 important remarks here:

1. There is a difference between "Visual Basic" and "(Visual) Basic" in the table above. Until 2010, "(Visual) Basic" referred to all possible dialects of Basic, including Visual Basic. After some discussion, it has been decided to split "(Visual) Basic" into all its dialects such as Visual Basic .NET, Classic Visual Basic, PureBasic, and Small Basic, just to name a few. Since Visual Basic .NET has become the major implementation of Visual Basic, it is now called "Visual Basic".
2. The programming language SQL has not been in the TIOBE index for a long time. In 2018, somebody pointed out that SQL is Turing Complete. From that moment on, SQL is part of the TIOBE index. So although this language is very old, it has only a short history in the index.

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Programming Language Hall of Fame

The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below. The award is given to the programming language that has the highest rise in ratings in a year.

Year	Winner
2020	Python
2019	C
2018	Python
2017	C
2016	Go
2015	Java
2014	JavaScript
2013	Transact-SQL
2012	Objective-C
2011	Objective-C
2010	Python
2009	Go
2008	C
2007	Python
2006	Ruby
2005	Java
2004	PHP
2003	C++

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Source: index | TIOBE - The Software Quality Company