Delve into the world of built-in app and system services available to developers. Discuss leveraging these services to enhance your app's functionality and user experience.

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PSA: Call Screening breaks in a multitude of ways; no missed call notifications or badges; not lighting up screen; not visible when using focus;
Call Screening has serious issues right now leading to missing calls from genuine callers because the system does not acknowledge them with missed call notifications or badges in a lot of cases. I'm posting this in the hope of catching an engineer who can bring this to the attention of the teams working on this. Filed as FB20678829 — I ran the following tests with iOS 26.1 beta 3, but the issues have been occurring on iOS 26.0 as well. I used an iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac for this. The iPhone has Call Screening enabled with the option „Ask Reason for Calling“ The iPhone has call forwarding enabled to all devices. Test 1: Active Focus Turn on a focus like Do not Disturb on all devices. Lock all devices. Make a phone call to the iPhone with an unknown number. Behavior: iPhone: displays Call Screening UI on the Lock Screen, but it will not light up the screen. You don’t know Call Screening is happening unless you activate the display just in that moment on devices without Always On Display. Watch: does nothing. Mac: does nothing. iPad: displays Call Screening UI on the Lock Screen, but it will not light up the screen. You don’t know Call Screening is happening unless you activate the display just in that moment. In this test the caller does not answer any of the Call Screening questions and just hangs up. The result is that only the Mac displays a missed call notification. iPhone, iPad, and Watch do not acknowledge the missed call (no phone app icon badge, no notification, no badge inside the Phone app itself), you can only see the call inside the Calls list when manually looking for it. Test 2: No Focus Turn off any focus like Do not Disturb on all devices. Lock all devices. Make a phone call to the iPhone with an unknown number. Behavior: iPhone: displays Call Screening UI on the Lock Screen, but it will not light up the screen. You don’t know Call Screening is happening unless you activate the display just in that moment on devices without Always On Display. Watch: does nothing. Mac: displays Call Screening UI when unlocked. iPad: displays Call Screening UI on the Lock Screen, but it will not light up the screen. You don’t know Call Screening is happening unless you activate the display just in that moment. In this test the caller does not answer any of the Call Screening questions and just hangs up. The result is that only the Mac displays a missed call notification. iPhone, iPad, and Watch do not acknowledge the missed call (no phone app icon badge, no notification, no badge inside the Phone app itself), you can only see the call inside the Calls list when manually looking for it. The only improvement here is that the Mac now shows the Call Screening UI. Test 3: Caller answers Call Screening questions An active focus does not matter. Lock all devices. Make a phone call to the iPhone with an unknown number. Once the caller answered the Call Screening questions, the following happens: All devices ring like expected When the caller hangs up or I don’t answer: Mac: Shows Missed Call notification without details iPhone: Shows Missed Call notification with transcript of Call Screening (also badges phone app icon) iPad: does nothing. Watch: Shows the mirrored iPhone notification. Things to note: When turning off call forwarding on iPhone to other Apple devices like iPad and Mac, the phone app icon is always badged for missed calls when Call Screening was active, but no notification is displayed regardless.
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109
Oct ’25
A Summary of the WWDC25 Group Lab - watchOS (Part 2)
At WWDC25 we launched a new type of Lab event for the developer community - Group Labs. A Group Lab is a panel Q&A designed for a large audience of developers. Group Labs are a unique opportunity for the community to submit questions directly to a panel of Apple engineers and designers. Here are the highlights from the WWDC25 Group Lab for watchOS (part 2). 7. For widget (complication) update budgets, is there an overall budget or are scheduled update separate from APNS updates? For context I have a complication that is updated on a fixed schedule (every 20 min), but there can be times of the day that are more "interesting" where pushes make sense. Like timeline updates, the system budgets WidgetKit push notifications and delivers them opportunistically. You can use WidgetKit push notification updates as an addition to timeline updates. For more information, see Updating widgets with WidgetKit push notifications. 8. It seems like the new Control Center widgets can be sourced from either the iPhone or directly on the Watch. Can we control whether a control appears in the watch list, or will it always be a combination of all controls from both sources? iPhone controls will be automatically available on the companion Apple Watch, even if they don’t have an associated watchOS app. When an iPhone control is tapped on the Apple Watch, the action is performed on the iPhone. Controls whose actions foreground the iOS app will not appear on Apple Watch. If a watchOS app has controls, no controls will appear on Apple Watch from the companion iOS app. 9. From UI/UX perspective, what are the current practices for Designing watchOS apps that feels native. The WWDC23 session Design and build apps for WatchOS 10 covers the details of watchOS design principles and how to apply them in your app using SwiftUI. A lot of SwiftUI APIs, such as NavigationSplitView, vertical tab view, list view, and etc, already implement the look and feel native to watchOS. 10. When adopting the new design system on watchOS, it seems like the main place we will use the glass effect is for our buttons in toolbar? Standard buttons in system apps seem to continue to use a flat appearance and full width. We leave the choice to you – You can use the new GlassButtonStyle API or .buttonStyle(.glass) to apply the liquid glass material to buttons. Learn when to use the Liquid Glass styles in Get to know the new design system. 11. Is there any way to gracefully migrate extensions when their bundleIDs have to change? e.g., converting a multi-target watch app to single-target, which drops the .watchkitextension from both the app and WidgetKit ext bundleIDs Updating a watchOS app to single-target is covered in TechNote TN3157: Updating your watchOS project for SwiftUI and WidgetKit. Xcode provides a tool that can do the update automatically, and the technote describes the details about how to use it and how to clean up the project after the automatic update. If there's something that technote doesn't address, please reach out to us on the Developer Forums. 12. What is the status of WatchConnectivity? Is that still the preferred way for iOS + watchOS communications? The Watch Connectivity framework is still supported, and is appropriate for the communication between an watchOS app and its companion iOS app. The systems also provide other APIs for the apps to exchange data. For example, watchOS supports Apple Push Notification service (APNs). If data for your widget changes on your server, your widget can receive a WidgetKit push notification, and update accordingly. That’s the preferred mechanism for widget updates.
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152
Jul ’25
[iOS 26] [PushToTalk] Not receiving microphone PCM sample when Transmission Starts from System UI.
Steps To reproduce: Login to application and App has joined the PTC channel. Push the application to background and Lock the device. From the System UI press the talk button which will start transmit. Audio Session has been activated and Audio unit has been initialised properly. On terminator side no media is being played out. Issue observed consistently on specific models which has configured audio codec with Stereo type. More details are added : FB20281626
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227
Oct ’25
CarKeyRemoteControlSession always returning empty
We are developing an iOS app to connect to vehicles and trigger predefined vehicle controls (door lock/unlock) via the Digital Key framework. We are currently blocked on several aspects and would appreciate your expertise to clarify the following queries. How can we list down connected vehicle information? What is the method to retrieve connection status? How can we perform vehicle control actions (e.g., door lock/unlock)? STEPS TO REPRODUCE Starting the CarKeyRemoteControlSession to Fetch Vehicle Reports Currently, we are using the following API to start a CarKeyRemoteControlSession: open class func start( delegate: any CarKeyRemoteControlSessionDelegate, subscriptionRange subscriptionFunctionIDRange: ClosedRange? = nil, with delegateCallbackQueue: DispatchQueue? = nil ) async throws -> CarKeyRemoteControlSession After successfully creating the session, we check for vehicle reports using the vehicleReports property of CarKeyRemoteControlSession: public var vehicleReports: [VehicleReport] { get throws }
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260
Feb ’25
How can a live caller id database be scaled to support millions of numbers that constantly change if it must be KPIR encoded?
The example database/server provided by Apple for Live Caller ID contains a hardcoded database with a tiny number of pre-defined numbers. However, its not expected to be representational of an live real world usage server. But the question is how can that be accomplished if its a requirement that the data be KPIR encrypted? In real world scenarios, the factors that effect whether a number should be blocked or not are continually changing and evolving on a minute-by-minute basis and new information becomes available or existing information changes. If the database supports tens of millions or hundreds of millions of constantly changing phone numbers, in order to meet the requirements of the Live Caller ID being KPIR encrypted, that would imply the database has to re-encrypt its database of millions endlessly for all time. That seems unfeasable and impractical to implement. Therefore how do the Apple designers of this feature envisage/suggest a real-world server supporting millions of changing data should meet the requirement to be KPIR encrypted?
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448
Mar ’25
Screen Time differences between DeviceActivityMonitor and times shown in DeviceActivityReport
I am still struggling to nail down the screen time between monitoring and showing it in a DeviceActivityReport. It's always off by a couple of percentage points, which results in a difference of a couple of minutes between the time shown for my total screen time in DeviceActivityReport and DeviceActivityMonitor with a threshold set for all apps/websites/categories. In the report, I am looping through all segment (there is only 1 segement using .daily segment interval for a given day) then loop through all categories and all apps within each category and sum up all totalActivityDuration for each app. Based on avaiable documentation, that should corrolate to DeviceActivityMonitor threshold but it doesn't. Are there any differences in how these 2 places count screen time? Are there any apps/core ios services which are excluded from DeviceActivityMonitor. Would appreciate any help at all, I'm losing my mind here. My current suspicion is that Apple Developer documentation is counted twice. i.e. this website https://developer.apple.com/documentation/deviceactivity/deviceactivitymonitor shows up in usage as an App with bundleId of apple.developer.wwdc-release and time spent there is counted twice, against this bundleId AND Safari. I don't know why it's not counted as a webdomain.
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227
Sep ’25
How do I launch the Outlook Mail app from my development app?
I want to start the mail application from the development application, but the mail application made by Apple starts. It doesn't work even if I change the default email application to Outlook. When you delete the Apple Mail app, Outlook starts. I want to automatically attach the generated pdf file to the email, but that doesn't work either. Please tell me how to code.
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104
Sep ’25
How to install macOS Tahoe 26 on an external drive
In the past I was always able to install every major macOS version on an external drive so that I can test my apps. But now I'm unable to install macOS Tahoe 26 on an external drive. Actually, as far as I'm aware, there are not even official links to macOS 26 installers, but only instructions on how to update to macOS 26 from an existing macOS installation. So I thought I'd install macOS 15 on a separate drive and then update to macOS 26, but whenever I run the macOS 15 installer, tell it to install on the external drive, and reboot after the setup process completes, my MacBook just boots into my main macOS partition as if nothing happened. 3 months ago I somehow managed to install macOS Tahoe beta 1 on an external drive, I don't remember how (but I don't think it was anything crazy); booting into that beta 1 partition and trying to update doesn't work either, as my MacBook again boots into my main macOS partition. I already asked help about the update problem one month ago here, but nobody replied. Could someone at Apple please provide instructions on how one is supposed to install macOS 26 on an external drive (if possible before it becomes available to the public)? Are we supposed to buy a separate Mac for every macOS version that we want to test our apps on?
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202
Sep ’25
Call log not updated by CallKit in TestFlight/iOS 26
We encountered an issue with iOS 26 and release version. We developed a voipout application and we created an entry in native call log on dev/prod version with our app that run under iOS 18.6 and earlier. On iOS 26 TestFlight version didn't create entry in call log but debug version did it. I don't find any clue in CallKit documentation for iOS 26 and we use action.fulfill(withDateStarted: .now) for call and end transaction and we develop under Xcode 26 Do you have any suggestion to solve our problems ?
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156
Sep ’25
Filtering MMS Messages with Multimedia Content (Images, Videos, etc.)
Hi Apple Developer, I’m working on a message-filtering application and reviewing Apple's documentation on message filtering. The documentation clearly states that MMS messages can be filtered. (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/identitylookup/sms-and-mms-message-filtering) When we refer to MMS, it includes images, short videos, and other supported multimedia formats. However, the ILMessageFilterQueryRequest only provides the message body as a String, meaning we can access text and links but not images or other media files. Could you please confirm whether Apple allows third-party applications to access multimedia content sent from unknown numbers? Looking forward to your quick response. Thanks, Rijul Singhal
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288
Feb ’25
ShieldConfiguration: Shield does not update when token is moved from one store to anohter (while in foreground)
Hello, I have noticed that the ShieldConfiguration is only requested when opening a target app, and never when the application token is moved to a different shield while the target app remains in foreground. This causes problems because many times the wrong ShieldConfiguration is displayed (recycled) instead of requesting a new ShieldConfiguration. This bug has been around since the introduction of the Screen Time API in 2020 and is has not been addressed. Bug reports: FB14237883 FB17902392 Please fix asap!! Not acceptable to have bugs not being addressed for more than 5 years. Most concerning: This is still reproducing on iOS 26 beta 7!! Thanks a lot for your help.
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233
Aug ’25
FinanceKit: Apple Cash transfers missing contact information
I’m testing FinanceKit with Apple Cash and noticed that transfers don’t include any counterparty information. Here’s an example transaction I fetched: Transaction( id: 5A96EA49-B7C9-4481-949D-88247210C1D7, accountID: 28D7C0E2-DC2A-4138-B105-BCE5EE00B705, transactionAmount: 30 USD, creditDebitIndicator: .credit, transactionDescription: "Transfer", originalTransactionDescription: "", merchantCategoryCode: nil, merchantName: nil, transactionType: .transfer, status: .booked, transactionDate: 2025-08-19 21:57:54 +0000, postedDate: 2025-08-19 21:57:55 +0000 ) As you can see: transactionDescription is just "Transfer" originalTransactionDescription is empty merchantName is nil No counterparty details are exposed In contrast, the Wallet app clearly shows the other person’s name and avatar for Apple Cash transfers, making it easy to understand who the payment was with. In FinanceKit, there’s no way to distinguish between transfers with different people — every transfer looks identical. Questions Is there a hidden or planned field for Apple Cash counterparty information? Can FinanceKit provide at least minimal metadata (e.g., contact name, initials, or a privacy-preserving identifier)? Is there any workaround today to correlate Apple Cash transfers with contacts? Feature request: Please expose counterparty information for Apple Cash transfers. Even something as simple as a stable identifier or name string would enable developers to build Wallet-quality transaction detail screens. Thanks!
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100
Aug ’25
Testing iMessage extension from recipient POV
Hello, I am building an iMessage extension for my app and I am struggling to figure out how to test it. The extension allows users to send their friends an interactive widget and the recipient experience is very important to test. I tried to do it in the simulators, but simulators do not support iMessage. I have got a second iPhone and created a sandbox account, but I cannot install TestFlight with the sandbox account, as this feature is not supported. Reddit, Stackoverflow, ChatGPT and Apple Developer support also did not help. Can someone share their experience with testing recipient experience in the iMessage extension?
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123
Aug ’25
Associated domain not recognised
I have a public and accessible .well-known/apple-app-site-association file for both my domain.com and subdomain.domain.com with "paths": ["*"] . Both example.com and blog.example.com are added in Associated domains and any link that contains domain.com and domain.com/path normally deep links into my app. I used to have an *.example.com that successfully deep linked all my subdomains into my app but now I had to remove it as some subdomains will need to link to other apps, but some should still link to the same app. I removed * but left blog.example.com as that specific subdomain still needs to deep link into my app. But now blog.example.com is not even being recognized by my app and any link starting with blog.example.com just opens in safari. What am I missing? Why is this happening ?
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117
Aug ’25