Same issue here. In my case I replaced the new WKWebView with the old UIWebView and everything worked fine again. Although deprecated the UIWebView seems less buggy.

This is so ridiculous and annoying. I don't even develop apps for the watch, yet Xcode constantly wants to prepare the watch for development and can't get it done. Seriously, Apple? Why don't any of you care about this problem? The only solution for me is to switch off the watch while working on apps.

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I found that UIWebView crashes on iOS 16 when zooming the view, so I had to switch to WKWebView using the workaround described by @gregorosaurus. Additionally, I had to add a 0.4 second delay to the reload to make it work.

I can confirm that this issue has been fixed in iPadOS 16.1

I can confirm that this issue has been fixed in iPadOS 16.1

Sure, iOS SDK: 16.0 macOS Version Ventura 13.2.1 (22D68) iOS: Mac Catalyst:

Meanwhile, since the issue still persists in iOS 17, and probably will never been fixed, the best solution is NOT to use WKWebView to display PDFs. Using the PDFView from Apples PDFKit results in a better user experience. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/pdfkit