New Apple Intermediate certificate for Push Notifications | Community
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New Apple Intermediate certificate for Push Notifications

  • February 10, 2022
  • 10 replies
  • 0 views
Jonathon13

I'm unable to upload a PEM certificate file to the Zendesk Chat dashboard as the certificate was issued after 27th Jan 2022. I get an error "PEM file is invalid."

I believe this is due Apple issuing APN certificates with a new Intermediate certificate, as explained here: https://developer.apple.com/support/expiration/.

If you plan to send notification requests or passes with certificates issued after January 27, 2022, you’ll need to download the Worldwide Developer Relations G4 sub CA, available for download.

The certificate I created prior to 27th Jan works fine (different Bundle ID used for testing). I believe Zendesk needs to install the new Intermediate certificate on their web servers to accept any newly created APN certificates.

Please help! We are about to go live with Chat!

      10 replies

      Emilio12
      • Emilio12
      • February 12, 2022

      Any update about this issue, the platform doesn't allow to update the PEM yet, I have the same issue like Jonathon.

      I will appreciate your help. Thanks.

        Mick11
        • Mick11
        • February 16, 2022

        Hi Jonathon and Emilio. Thanks for flagging this issue with us. We're working to get this one resolved as soon as possible so that uploads are accepted once again with the new signing structure. I don't have an exact date, but as soon as this is resolved, I'll update this post to let you know. Our apologies for this inconvenience. 

          O
          • Oren14
          • February 24, 2022

          Hi guys, I'm also getting this error. Would be happy to hear of any progress

          N
          • Nelson12
          • March 1, 2022

          Hi team,

          Any update on this? I'm surprised this is not a priority on your support tickets.

          Our push notifications certificate expired and we can't upload our new one since you guys don't support it.

          Our clients haven't been able to receive push notifications when our agents reply to their chats for over 3 months now. 
          Chats expire before customers reply and they leave with the idea that we never replied their chats.
          This is generating a lot of insatisfaction on our customers and we're losing customers thanks to that.

          This is a major feature not working, do you at least have an ETA?

          Mick11
          • Mick11
          • March 2, 2022

          Hi everyone,

          We've done some internal investigation on this issue. It appears that the new structure certs are being accepted (and uploaded) by Admin Center for production certs only. For both the old and new certs, the sandbox certs are not uploading today (existing limitation). We're working to remove this limitation now, we don't have an exact timeline yet.

          Please comment below if you have any issues uploading a production cert to Admin Center however, and we can investigate this in a Support ticket.

          Jonathon13
          • Jonathon13
          • Author
          • March 2, 2022

          Hi Mick, thanks for the update, however I am still getting an error "PEM file is invalid" when uploading a recently generated "Apple Push Notification service SSL (Sandbox & Production)" certificate. I am unable to create a Production-only certificate via Apple Developer, no option is provided for this.

          To clarify, I am trying to upload to the Chat Dashboard (https://[my-tenant].zendesk.com/chat/agent#account/api_&_sdks).

          Thanks

          Mick11
          • Mick11
          • March 7, 2022

          Hi Jonathon,

          Thanks for this update. I'm going to raise this with the Chat Dashboard team, and we'll investigate further. I'll reply here once we have more information.

          N
          • Nelson12
          • March 9, 2022

          Hi Mick, 

          Same here, still getting the "PEM file is invalid" message. Any workaround we can have to update the certificate and have our push notifications working again?

          Mick11
          • Mick11
          • March 24, 2022

          Hi Nelson & all,

          This has now been resolved on by our Chat back-end team. Please re-test and let us know if you're still experiencing this specific issue for some reason. Many thanks for raising this, it was extremely helpful.

          Jonathon13
          • Jonathon13
          • Author
          • March 31, 2022

          Thanks Mick, confirmed. We were able to upload a new cert and are now receiving push notifications.

          Cheers!

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