For those running into this issue who actually are using Push Notifications in their apps:
Our push certs were recently about to expire, so we created new dev / prod push certs in the standard way outlined by Apple (I won't go into detail around this here, there is plenty of info on it all over the web when updating your push certs for another year of use).
After doing so however, the issue in this question popped up. No matter what we did, we received this email from Apple after submitting our app. When we checked the settings of our Distribution Provisioning Profile in the Apple Member Center, everything looked fine (Push was enabled for our App ID for both prod / dev, and our distribution provisioning profile was still connected to this App ID, we literally just created new push certs for another year as is the standard practice).
Finally, this is what ended up solving it for me:
- Create a new Distribution Provisioning Profile pointing to your App ID (leave your current one in tact)
- In Xcode, refresh your provisioning profiles via Settings > Accounts > Select your account > Details > Click the refresh icon
- Manually create an entitlements plist file for your app:
- File menu > New File...
- Select iOS > Resource > Property List
- Name the new file "foo.entitlements" (typically, "foo" is the target name)
- Click the (+) next to "Entitlements File" to add a top-level item (the property list editor will use the correct schema due to the file extension)
- Ensure this entitlements file is being used in your target's Build Settings (Target > Build Settings > Search for "Entitlements", in the CODE_SIGN_ENTITLEMENTS set the path to your Entitlements file you just made)
- Make sure the provisioning profile / code signing identity in your Target is set correctly to your appropriate distribution provisioning profile / signing identity (this should be obvious)
- I'm not 100% sure if this affected it (it shouldn't since Target settings override project settings, but I did this anyways), make sure your Project's provisioning profile / signing identity match your Target's
- In the entitlements file you made, right click in the empty file and select "Show Raw Keys/Values"
- Add a new entry to the entitlements file called "aps-environment" and set it's value to "production"
- One key note, if you were previously using the keychain-access-groups entitlement, you'll want to add that key here as well because for some reason it got cleared for me when doing this manually. Make sure the value is the same as the value used in previous builds (you can find the value by finding a previous build in Organizer, attempting to submit to the app store, select your team, then before submitting the app tap the arrow beside the "(X) Entitlements" string to expand the entitlements and see the value of the keychain-access-group entitlement.
- Archive your app and attempt to submit it to the point of getting to the final "Submit" button. You should see this app was now built with the new provisioning profile you created in member center. Cancel out of this now.
- Go back to the Apple member center and delete the new provisioning profile you created in step 1.
- Back in Xcode, refresh your provisioning profiles list once again by repeating step 2.
- Now archive your app again, and you should see that the app was built with the old Distribution provisioning profile you wanted to use, and correctly has the aps-environment entitlement. Submit and you're done.
I know this isn't as detailed as it should be as it should have screenshots, I will try to update it with screenshots when I can but for the time being I'm in a time crunch right now and wanted to get the jist of what I did out there. There is also a very likely chance that some or most of the steps I've outlined aren't necessary, I'm putting them here because I did them and they may have led to the final solution.