iOS: Production push notifications, Invalid token from APNS server

The device token for production is different than the development one, so if you send a development token to production APNS servers (or vica versa), that's the cause of the problem.

It's possible you didn't remove the development device token from your server when you switched to production.

Or if you are getting the development token from your production app, then either the app is returning a locally stored device token (which you may have stored on your device during development) instead of asking Apple to get a new one, or (if you do ask Apple for a current token and still get the development token) your app is not signed with the production provisioning profile.

I re-downloaded the push production certificate and exported it from the keychain as .p12. This seems to have solved the problem. It seems strange though that a bad private key was giving me the "Invalid Token" error.

MyApp is an iOS app that sends and receives Push Notifications MyApp-to-MyApp using APN token IDs fetched from a database that is kept updated by each MyApp at logon. The Push Notifications are sent by MyApp using the NWPusher framework API.

As long as the project was run in Developer (Debug) mode, sent and received Push Notifications worked perfectly. But, in Production mode, sending Push Notifications would not work.

I went back and completely recreated my AppID, SSL certificates, provisions, etc., but to no avail. Next I used the NWPusher MacOS Pusher app to experiment with sending Push Notifications to MyApp. I configured Pusher to send a Push Notification (to the tokenID of an Ad Hoc distribution of MyApp) with MyApp’s Production SSL certificate, and got the following message in the Pusher log: "Notification error: APN invalid token".

I next noticed that Pusher had a checkbox option “Should use sandbox environment” checked. I unchecked the option and tried it again. This time the Push Notification was sent and then received by the target phone without any errors. This led me to take another look at the NWPusher.connect call:

Swift:

            let pusher:NWPusher? = try? NWPusher.connect(withPKCS12Data: pkcs12! as Data, password:APNS_Certificate_Password,environment:NWEnvironment(rawValue:1)!)

which has an environment argument NWEnvironment enum with possible values 0=none, 1=sandbox, 2=production, 3=auto.

Changing rawValue:1 (develop sandbox) to rawValue:2 (production) fixed the problem: Production Push Notifications now work without errors.