Error adding Apple Developer Account: authentication service is unavailable

Question

I’m trying to add an apple developer account to VS 2019 Community ver. 16.9.2 for Windows.

Once I set the Apple ID and Password and click on Login, I get the following message: “There was an error while trying to log in: Authentication service is unavailable.”

The Apple ID and Passwords are correct, in fact, if I type in the wrong credentials then Visual Studio complains about invalid id/password combination.

I disabled the firewall during the process so this should not be a connection issue.

Also, I made sure I have no pending agreements on Apple Store Connect. My apple developer account is valid and has no issues. In fact, I can use the same account on xcode just fine.

Is there some workaround?

Answer 1

THIS ISSUE IS FIXED IN THE 16.9.6 VISUAL STUDIO UPDATE !!!

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(old workarounds) There are some workarounds but none of them worked for me and updating to the latest version didn't help either (Visual Studio 2019 16.9.4). For as far as I know this issue persists even on version 16.7.5 of VS2019. For some people the workarounds seem to work so I will list them here so hopefully some of us can get on with our projects.

Workaround 1 (offered by Xamarin team):

• Close Visual Studio 2019
• Delete the following folder %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp\Xamarin\XMA
• Open project -> clean sollution
• Set Automatic for bundle signing in the iOS project settings
• Rebuild (- if it doesn't work try again after restarting pc)

Workaround 2:

• Delete your apple account from VS2019 through Tools–> Options --> Xamarin–> Apple Accounts
• Sign back in again
• Download your provisioning profile from developer.apple.com account to you pc
• Copy and paste it into: \Users\YOUR_USERACCOUNT\AppData\Local\Xamarin\iOS\Provisioning\Profiles
• If it doesn't work, perform in combination with workaround 1

Workaround 3:

• Delete apple account from VS
• Remove certificates from AppData\Local\Xamarin\iOS\Provisioning\Certificates
• Remove profiles from AppData\Local\Xamarin\iOS\Provisioning\Profiles
• Add Apple account
• Set to Automatic Provisioning and select team, it will error again but will reinstall the certificates
• Manually download provisioning profile and copy it to - AppData\Local\Xamarin\iOS\Provisioning\Profiles
• Run the archiving process should error out again but the “id” or name of the provisioning will be displayed in the error
• Rename the provisioning file to match and rerun archiving.

As I said these workarounds don't work for me but I hope they do for you. If it doesn't then you're in the same boat as me and you're going to need to follow this thread: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Error-adding-Apple-Developer-Account:-au/1380749?viewtype=all

Answer 2

I just went through the exact same problem and it took forever to work out. I'd had my app running locally and debugging on my iphone just fine. A few months later this bug popped up... I needed to simply update iTunes. iTunes handles the handshake stuff for your iOs devices and Windows.

Answer 3

I was able to use a combination of several workarounds from Michael's answer to get the app signed and deployed on an iPhone (for debugging). Here are the steps in correct order that worked for me:

• Set Automatic for bundle signing in the iOS project settings

• Delete your apple account from VS2019 through Tools–> Options --> Xamarin–> Apple Accounts

• Close Visual Studio 2019

• Delete the following folder %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp\Xamarin\XMA

• Delete all "obj", "bin" and ".vs" folders for the solution

• Download your provisioning profile from developer.apple.com account to you PC and save it to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Xamarin\iOS\Provisioning\Profiles

• Open Visual Studio 2019

• Add your apple account from VS2019 through Tools–> Options --> Xamarin–> Apple Accounts

• Build. It will error out while signing the app.

• Look at the error. It should specify the expected file name for your provisioning profile. The file name is a long string of hex digits with extension ".mobileprovision".

• Go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Xamarin\iOS\Provisioning\Profiles and rename your provisioning profile file into file name from the error message.

• Build again. It should work now!