What Happened to my Sideloaded Apps When my Apple Developer Membership Expired

February 1, 2025

I don't know if this will be of much help, but maybe someone, somewhere will find this information useful.

If you aren't in the EU, sideloading on iOS devices is really annoying. You can only sideload 3 apps at a time, 10 app IDs at a time, and apps expire after a week. This is annoying, however, you can choose to purchase an Apple Developer account, which will remove these limitations and make apps expire after a year instead. However, the cost is $100 a year.

This is what happened to me when my Apple Developer Membership expired:

First, they start sending you a bunch of emails when your membership is close to expiring. This is very annoying, although I can see why they do it. If you were an actual app developer releasing apps on the App Store, I feel this would be important information.

Once your account expires, it seems for some time you can keep using your sideloaded apps. Not only that, but you can continue to sideload an infinite number of apps. I have no proof of this, but that was my experience, as well as what I've heard happen to other people on Reddit. That is nice.

With that said, you will be unable to access anything in the "Certificates, IDs & Profiles" section of your Apple Developer account. This might not seem like a big deal, and it probably isn't, but there are some times where going into that is useful, mainly remembering what you set App IDs to.

However, after about a week of the membership expiring, my sideloaded apps stopped working, somewhat. On my main phone and my sister's phone, they stopped. But on my second phone they worked just fine. This is also different from the apps expiring. When apps expire, you will see an alert saying something like:

"App" Is No Longer Available

But in this case, the apps launch and then immediately crash.

Sadly, I didn't try to reload the apps, and I wish I did, because I wonder if that would of restored them. Maybe next year I will try it again. But currently, that's all I know.