Thank you for your response! It sounds like option 2 is the one I will need to do. Are there examples on how to do this? I'm unsure of how to locate the existing store and how to copy it to the App Group container's root folder and couldn't find anything from searches

Thank you for your response. This appears to be fairly similar to what I am currently doing, but unfortunately I still lose data from the main app when testing the addition of the App Group/Widget Extension.