🛑 Apple Deprecates template_name for Provisioning Profiles

It broke fastlane match for everyone, but see how it affects teams using managed capabilities, formerly known as custom entitlements

Jun 10, 2025

In May 2025, Apple made a breaking change to their provisioning profile APIs: they silently removed support for the undocumented template_name parameter. This deprecation had immediate consequences for teams using fastlane match to manage provisioning profiles — especially those working with special capabilities known as custom entitlements.

This post covers what changed, how it impacts your CI/CD pipelines, what fastlane did to patch the issue (for most users), and what to expect moving forward.

🤔 So, what is this “template_name” thing?

This is what I asked myself when I saw this issue was gaining a lot of traction in fastlane issues and PRs, so here’s what I learned:

Apple provides certain entitlements only to approved developers — things like:

com.apple.developer.healthkit.access (advanced HealthKit access)
com.apple.developer.driverkit
com.apple.developer.carplay-messaging

These are commonly referred to as custom entitlements or additional entitlements, but the new official term by Apple is “managed capabilities”. Apple requires that developers request access to them before they can be used and, upon approval, associates a special App ID template with the developer’s account.

The only way to generate a provisioning profile with those entitlements programmatically used to be passing that template’s identifier — the template_name — to Apple’s API when creating a profile.

fastlane supported this through the template_name parameter in match. It worked reliably for years, despite the fact that Apple never documented or officially supported the parameter.

😬 Apple removes support for `template_name`

If you saw an error like:

The provided entity includes an unknown attribute - 'templateName' is not an attribute on the resource 'profiles' - /data/attributes/templateName

It’s because in late May 2025, Apple removed support for the template_name parameter altogether. That change broke profile creation for all users of fastlane — even those not using managed capabilities — since fastlane would serialize template_name parameter as nil, which Apple’s API also started rejecting.

See GitHub Issue #29498 for the initial bug report.

🩹 The temporary fix for most users

To quickly unblock the majority of teams — the ones not using managed capabilities — a PR was merged that removes the template_name parameter entirely for everyone.

If you’re not using managed capabilities, this fix is already available in the latest fastlane release v2.228.0. You can resume generating profiles with match as usual.

🚧 Still Broken for Managed Capabilities

If your app depends on one of Apple’s managed capabilities, this fix stops the crashes, but it will create provisioning profiles that don’t include your custom entitlements. There is currently no official way to programmatically specify which App ID template to use when creating a provisioning profile.

To solve this, Apple recommends using automatic signing via Xcode or Xcode Cloud, which automatically selects the right template when managing signing for your app, but we know how things end with automatic signing in large teams 😅 which is the whole point of using match.

🚀 What’s Next?

The fastlane team deprecated the template_name parameter in match until Apple provides an official way to handle managed capabilities (fka custom entitlements) through automation. For now:

If you don’t use custom entitlements: You’re safe. fastlane works as expected again.
If you do: You’ll need to manually manage profiles via the Developer Portal or use Xcode’s UI until Apple updates their APIs.
- See Apple - Provisioning for managed capabilities to learn more.
- Since Apple migrated from “additional entitlements” to “managed capabilities”, you may need to re-assign some of these entitlements to your App IDs, if they are missing. You can request additional entitlement migration to managed capabilities via this contact form (as the Account Holder) if any previously assigned entitlements are not visible.

The team will be actively monitoring the situation and will update fastlane’s documentation and tooling once Apple provides a supported alternative.

Let us know if you’ve been affected by this change — or if you’ve found a workaround we should document!

Special thanks to everyone in the community that contributed with knowledge, new findings, and test attempts in fastlane issues & PRs. These were invaluable!

And thanks everyone for tagging me over the past couple weeks to bring this critical issue to my attention 🙈

Join our discussion at [match] creation of profiles with managed capabilities (custom entitlements)#29609 💬 to learn the latest developments and continue contributing with new findings - especially if you use managed capabilities! 🙏