{"id":14071,"date":"2016-04-04T15:40:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T19:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=14071"},"modified":"2017-09-26T11:08:28","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T15:08:28","slug":"working-around-broken-mac-app-store-test-account-switching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2016\/04\/04\/working-around-broken-mac-app-store-test-account-switching\/","title":{"rendered":"Working Around Broken Mac App Store Test Account Switching"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since Mac OS X 10.11.2<\/a>, I have had problems testing the Mac App Store versions of my apps using an iTunes Connect sandbox user account<\/a>. You are supposed to be able to launch the app, get prompted for an Apple ID and password, enter the test account credentials, and have it automatically download a receipt and launch the app. Instead, I would get the<\/a> dreaded<\/a> “This Apple ID has not yet been used with the App Store. Please review your account information.” alert.<\/p>\n

For a brief time in January, test accounts worked for me after I installed an updated Apple certificate<\/a> in the System keychain. Then, in early March<\/a>, they stopped working again, despite having the new certificate.<\/p>\n

Weeks of communication with Apple via Radar<\/a> and developer support channels did not produce anything helpful except for the knowledge that completely cleaning out my keychains and certificates did not<\/em> help. The same problem was occurring on both of my Macs—though, curiously, not in a clean VMware Mac OS X installation that was missing<\/em> the WWDR certificate that I’d had to update before.<\/p>\n

This led me to hypothesize that I was looking in the wrong place with the certificates and actually the problem was with the local store software. I found that deleting the cache folder:<\/p>\n

~\/Library\/Caches\/com.apple.appstore<\/pre>\n
and restarting the Mac allowed me to launch apps using the test user. (I’ve since discovered that others<\/a> have also found this to help.)<\/p>\n
However, this is more of a workaround than a fix because test accounts still don’t work normally, i.e. the way they did prior to December 2015. Once I’ve launched an app with a test account, the App Store app itself becomes unusable. It refuses to let me purchase or update apps, saying that one cannot purchase from the sandbox environment, even though the App Store app is logged into my regular Apple ID.<\/p>\n
I got the App Store app to work by again deleting the cache folder and restarting the Mac. However, after I successfully updated a few apps, I again got the Apple ID errors when trying to test apps using a sandbox user. The same thing happened on my other Mac.<\/p>\n
My conclusion is that, at least with Mac OS X 10.11.4, every<\/em> time I want to switch from testing an app to using the Mac App Store like a regular user—or vice-versa—I have to delete the cache folder and restart the Mac.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since Mac OS X 10.11.2, I have had problems testing the Mac App Store versions of my apps using an iTunes Connect sandbox user account. You are supposed to be able to launch the app, get prompted for an Apple ID and password, enter the test account credentials, and have it automatically download a receipt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[131,1361,1583,30,39,1199,71],"class_list":["post-14071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-bug","tag-itunes-connect-sandbox-testers","tag-keychain","tag-mac","tag-macappstore","tag-mac-os-x-10-11","tag-programming"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14071"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14073,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14071\/revisions\/14073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}