ios enterprise: provisioning profile and certificate expiration - when will App stop to work?

Question

We have a inhouse ipad App that was signed with an ios enterprise distribution certificate.

In the 'provisioning profiles' list on the iPad, I can see that the provisioning profile of this app expires in about two weeks.

So far i found information online only about 'certificate' expiration and the terms 'provisioning profile' and 'certificate' seem to be used interchangably sometimes in regards to expiration, but these are not the same files.

Is it theoretically possible, that the certificate (not the provisioning profile) that was used to sign this app expires earlier than this date?

What happens if the certificate expires while the provisioning profile is still valid? When exactly does the app stop running?

How can I check when that the certificate will expire?

Answer 1

Understand this is old, but Figured I would answer:

If you have an enterprise account it is entirely possible for your certificate to expire. The default time period for a distribution certificate on an enterprise account is 3 years. At the time that it expires your app will no longer run on any devices that you have distributed it to, it will just crash.

An enterprise developer account will allow you to have 2 certificates at the same time. The best way to avoid having problems with this is to create a new certificate every 1.5-2 years and switch over your new builds to use the new cert so that all of your users have a lot of time to install a new build before it stops working for them.