How to Test Apple Pay in Sandbox: Common Pitfalls and Setup Guide

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A developer at a company was tasked with integrating Apple Pay for the first time after management requested support for Google Pay and Apple Pay alongside an existing card payment flow. While the code integration was completed in roughly one day with AI assistance, testing the implementation in a UAT sandbox environment presented unexpected challenges. The article documents the process of working with a .p12 certificate file, including how to extract and verify certificates and private keys using OpenSSL commands. It also highlights the critical distinction between two types of Apple Pay certificates — the Merchant Identity Certificate and the Payment Processing Certificate — which serve different purposes and cannot be used interchangeably. The write-up is intended as a practical reference for engineers encountering similar hurdles when setting up Apple Pay sandbox testing.

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