Widget not available on developer iPhone

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Created Dec ’20

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I feel like this should be a pretty common problem with a pretty simple answer, but has anyone encountered a problem where your app's widget is not available on a device where you've been testing a dev version of your app as well as installing the App Store version? So what I mean is, on my iPhone, I'm often testing daily builds of our app, and I'm also installing our app from the App Store. At some point, this combo results in our app's widget being unavailable in the list of widgets on my iPhone. I've tried uninstalling dev builds, App Store releases, and so on, but the widget never comes back on a new install. Looking for a magic combo here, I guess, to clear some mystery widget registry or something.

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Answer 1

MarqueIV OP

Sep ’21

This may not be related to you having two different versions. One thing that an Apple engineer at WWDC pointed out to me is any time you do a new install of an app, you have to manually launch that app at least once before they make its widgets available in the widget browser. This apparently does not include launching it from Xcode (which they said is an issue that they are working on.)

As such, in our case, when debugging our app, we had to minimize (i.e. go back to the home screen) the app, then manually tap on the icon to bring it right back to the front. Once we did that, our widgets would show up in the browser again.

Again, make sure to minimize, not close the app or you'll kill your debug session. Minimize, tap the icon to open it back up again and you should be good to go.

Their reasoning is they only want things to appear in the browser that you have explicitly accessed, not simply installed, and since you're basically doing new installs throughout the dev process, that can cause the issue.

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