What does APS stand for?

APNS is Apple Push Notification Service.

From what I read here: https://brunoscheufler.com/blog/2020-12-07-apns-environments-and-push-notifications

The APS Environment entitlement tells your app whether to use the sandbox or production APNs environment, which are completely separate. Device tokens created for applications running in the development APS environment will only work for the sandbox, and tokens generated from the production environment may only be used for production.

there are 2 types of environment for Apple push services.

So I guess aps stands for the various AP Apple Push …

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I would add my 2 cents to that article:

If you distribute builds via Xcode Cloud be aware that different artefacts use different aps-environments:

Ad-Hoc and Appstore: Production

Development: Development (aka Sandbox)

You can check aps-environment for artefact from xcode cloud build by inspecting aps-environment key inside DistributionSummary.plist located next to .ipa.

It's also possible to get this value in runtime like FirebaseSDK does (see SO research)

(Using embedded.provisionprofile or embedded.mobileprovision)