AppTesters Premium and Ultimate Lifetime plans provide ongoing service coverage for the registered device under the applicable plan terms. “Lifetime” describes the AppTesters plan and its revoke-protection benefit; it does not mean that one Apple-issued certificate can remain technically valid forever.
The plan and the certificate are different
Your AppTesters plan is the service relationship attached to the registered device. The Apple signing certificate is a technical credential issued through an Apple Developer account. Apple controls the certificate's validity period, developer-account status, UDID registration rules, and enforcement systems.
This means a Lifetime customer may periodically receive renewed or replacement certificate files while the underlying AppTesters plan remains active.
What does revoke protection cover?
Historically, AppTesters has provided free replacements for normal eligible revocations since 2022. Normal future revocations remain covered according to Premium or Ultimate revoke protection.
The extraordinary 2025 Apple developer-account event affected an unusually large number of accounts and thousands of certificates at the same time. AppTesters first attempted free replacements, but rapidly issuing a very large number of replacements resulted in additional account terminations and tighter, slower developer-account approvals.
Because of that exceptional capacity problem, affected customers in the current recovery cycle are offered discounted replacements rather than normal free replacement processing. Paying the discounted amount does not cancel the Lifetime plan, restart it, or convert it into a yearly subscription.
AppTesters intends normal free replacement handling to resume for ordinary eligible revocations once this exceptional recovery cycle is behind us. A future ecosystem-wide event of similar scale may need to be evaluated separately.
No signing provider can promise that Apple will never revoke a certificate. Since January 2026, AppTesters has delivered 1,500+ certificates through its current setup with no revocations reported so far, but past performance is not a guarantee of future results.