So you have googled whole lots of ways on finding how to install or accept a bad certificate on your iPad and keep doing your things for so and so reason. This problem arise when iPad / iPhone detects bad SSL certificate and it dont even prompt you to accept the certificate causing you tons of frustration for getting your work done and you could start hours/days of research on making it work.

You have seen many methods lik:

  • Extracting a bad certificate from your desktop and emailing to your iPad and install it.
  • Creating actual valid certificate and have it installed on the environment.
  • Tons of other methods found on google/stackoverflow.

You may not be able to do all of the above for reasons like it may take days to install or approval for budget or lack of access to servers or just can’t wait that long and need something quick.

Here’s the easy way that will work on almost any internal or external environment without you doing any of the above.

  • Go to unsecured page from where secured access begins. For example Shopping Cart page. Once you hit “Continue to Checkout” or “Checkout” your secured area begins.
  • On the Shopping Cart page, try to find some link that directs you to secured “https” page of the website that you are trying to accept bad certificate on.
  • OR simply make any of the URL “https” call and try to navigate to that page.
  • Now you should be able to get prompt for accepting bad certificate on your iOS device.
  • Once you accept it, you should be able to now browse through any portion of the web-site that is served on “https” access that uses bad certificate.

Please note that you are intentionally accepting bad SSL certificate so I am assuming you (mostly developer or technical folks) know what you are doing and this is not for normal shoppers/visitors.