We are developing an enterprise app that connects to a local server. It uses simple URLSessions. There is a view in the app where you enter the server url (IP address) and a connection check is made. iOS asks for permission to access the local network. Everything works. If the server is reachable, the connection info is saved. Recently we encountered a very strange issue: We also have a beta version of this app. If we first install the normal version on a device, enter the server IP, save, and then install the beta version and do the same there: It does not get a connection (it waits for the timeout). The strange part is: If I try to configure the connection in the normal version again, it also does not work, it just waits for the timeout. The really strange part: When I delete the beta version, while the normal version is waiting for its connection, the connection succeeds immediately. Both versions have a different display name, bundle id. I also tried using a device that is not in our MDM: same problem. Even the iOS version seems to have no impact: I tried on iOS 15, 18 and 26. Is there an explanation and hopefully also a solution to this problem?

I've noticed that if a call to startVPNTunnel() is made while no network interface is active on the system, the call "succeeds" (i.e., doesn't throw), but the VPN connection state goes straight from NEVPNStatus.disconnecting to NEVPNStatus.disconnected. The docs for startVPNTunnel() state: In Swift, this method returns Void and is marked with the throws keyword to indicate that it throws an error in cases of failure. Additionally, there is an NEVPNConnectionError enum that contains a noNetworkAvailable case. However, this isn't thrown in this case, when startVPNTunnel() is called. I just wanted to ask under what circumstances startVPNTunnel() does throw, and should this be one of them? Additionally, to catch such errors, would it be better to call fetchLastDisconnectError() in the .NEVPNStatusDidChange handler?

After dropping an A-record TTL to 60 secs (it was previously no higher than 600 secs for several weeks) and making an IP change for a small business website on Monday, I took down the old web service just over 24 hours later on Tuesday evening. We then had reports of some customers not being able to access the website on Wednesday morning. On investigation using my iPhone it would appear that Apple Private Relay is still directing clients to the old IP address. It's just as well I have iCloud+ as I would never have seen this issue otherwise and would have been none the wiser as to why some customers were having problems. Has anyone else seen this and/or have a fix other than waiting longer? Do you know how long it takes for Apple Private Relay to update? This isn't expected behaviour of DNS? I spoke to someone at Apple yesterday and there wasn't much they can do. I hope they're escalating internally as almost 3 days later it's still pointing users to the old IP address despite having ample time for proper DNS propagation.

I have been using the SCNetworkReachabilityGetFlags for 10+ years to inform users that their request won't work. In my experience this works pretty well although i am aware of the limitations. Now, i am looking into the NWPathMonitor, and i have one situation that i'm trying to. get my head around - it's asynchronous. Specifically, i am wondering what to do when my geofences trigger and i want to check network connectivity - i want to tell the user why the operation i'll perform because of the trigger couldn't be done. SO. say i start a NWPathMonitor in didFinishLaunchingWithOptions. When the app is booted up because of a geofence trigger, might i not end up in a case where my didEnterRegion / didExitRegion gets called before the NWPathMonitor has gotten its first status? The advantage here with SCNetworkReachabilityGetFlags, as i understand it, would be that it's synchronous? If i want to upgrade to nwpathmonitor, i guess i have to do a method that creates a nwpathmonitor, uses a semaphore to wait for the first callback, then contunues? Thoughts appreciated

Hello, We are facing an issue with performing a DTLS handshake when our iOS application is in the background. Our app (Vocera Collaboration Suite – VCS) uses secure DTLS-encrypted communication for incoming VoIP calls. Problem Summary: When the app is in the background and a VoIP PushKit notification arrives, we attempt to establish a DTLS handshake over our existing socket. However, the handshake consistently fails unless the app is already in the foreground. Once the app is foregrounded, the same DTLS handshake logic succeeds immediately. Key Questions: Is performing a DTLS handshake while the app is in the background technically supported by iOS? Or is this an OS-level limitation by design? If not supported, what is the Apple-recommended alternative to establish secure DTLS communication for VoIP flows without bringing the app to the foreground? Any guidance or clarification from Apple engineers or anyone who has solved a similar problem would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Currently in our app, to identify a network switch in device we are doing NEHotspotHelper.register and then NEHotspotHelperHandler block. When the command type is evaluate and if the network.didJustJoin, we are identifying it as a network switch. As a part of moving our code base to iOS 26, if is found that NEHotspotHelper is deprecated. What is the proper replacement for this?

Description: We are investigating an issue where running a specific e-commerce iOS app inside the Xcode Simulator intermittently disrupts the Mac’s network connectivity. When the app is launched in the Simulator, our NETransparentProxyProvider and NEFilterDataProvider extensions occasionally stop receiving traffic correctly, and shortly afterward the entire macOS DNS resolution fails. Once this happens, all apps on the Mac lose internet access until mac is restarted. Disabling extensions also fixing the issue. This issue only appears when the app runs in the Xcode Simulator. I would like to confirm: Is it possible for traffic patterns or network behavior inside the Simulator to interfere with system-level Network Extension providers on macOS? Are there known limitations or conflicts between the Simulator’s virtual networking interfaces and Network Extensions? Any recommended debugging steps or best practices to isolate this behavior? Any guidance, known issues, or suggestions would be appreciated.

Hello, I am studying the Building peer-to-peer apps codebase https://developer.apple.com/documentation/wifiaware/building-peer-to-peer-apps and am wondering why no connection is ever started? I searched the codebase and didn't find .start() be called once. Start function I'm referencing https://developer.apple.com/documentation/network/networkconnection/start() Are NetworkConnections started automatically? Note that I am using QUIC NetworkConnections (NetworkConnection) in what I'm trying to do.

Is there any way to forcibly disable using QUIC? I've noticed this ends up causing issues with our ISP / router, and noticed for many of our customers as well. Creating an ephemeral session doesn't change things, and setting the request to "assumeHttp3Capable" to false doesn't fix things either. We are using Cloudflare Workers as the URL we are hitting, and thus aren't able to disable this server-side.

Hello, I have an app that was using the iOS 18 Network Framework APIs. It used Peer to Peer, QUIC and Bonjour. It was all working as expected. I wanted to upgrade to the new iOS 26 Network Framework APIs (NetworkBrowser, NetworkListener, NetworkConnection...). I have things working (multiple devices can discover each other, connection to each other and send messages to each other) but my app crashes when I go to toggle of all the networking stuff. In the iOS 18 Network Framework API NWConnection had a .cancel() function I could use to tell the other side the connection was done. I dont see a cancel function for NetworkConnection. My question is - how do I properly close down a NetworkConnection and also properly tell the other side the connection is done.

I am developing a React Native app that uses UDP broadcast and device discovery over the local Wi-Fi network (similar to 4Stream). In Debug mode everything works, but after uploading to TestFlight the local network communication stops working. I have already added the following to Info.plist:

Hi everyone, I am building a React Native iOS app that discovers audio devices on the local Wi-Fi network using UDP broadcast + mDNS/Bonjour lookup (similar to the “4Stream” app). The app works 100% perfectly in Debug mode when installed directly from Xcode. But once I upload it to TestFlight, the local-network features stop working completely: UDP packets never arrive Device discovery does not work Bonjour/mDNS lookup returns nothing Same phone, same Wi-Fi, same code → only Debug works, TestFlight fails react-native-udp for UDP broadcast react-native-dns-lookup for resolving hostnames react-native-xml2js for parsing device responses

I want to detect if the adapter is connected to the iPhone even if no IP has been given to the iPhone. I can detect that the interface is connected when the iPhone has been given an IP address, but how can I detect the adapter when not?

I am trying to migrate an app to use Network framework for p2p connection. I came across this great article for migrating to Network framework however this doesnt use the new structured concurrency. This being introduced with iOS 26, there doesnt seem to be any sample code available on how to use the new classes. I am particularly interested in code samples showing how to add TLS with PSK encryption support and handling of switching between Wifi and peer to peer interface with the new structured concurrency supported classes. Are there any good resources I can refer on this other than the WWDC video?

I develop a Network Extension with NEFilterDataProvider and want to understand how to stop or disable it on exit of the base app without deactivating NE from OS and leave ability to start it again without requiring a password from the user. It starts normally, but when I try to disable it: NEFilterManager.sharedManager.enabled = NO; [NEFilterManager.sharedManager saveToPreferencesWithCompletionHandler:^(NSError * _Nullable error) { // never called }]; the completion handler has never called. But stopFilterWithReason inside the NE code called by the framework where I only replay with required completionHandler();. Then NE process keeps alive. I also tried to call remove, which should disable NE: [NEFilterManager.sharedManager removeFromPreferencesWithCompletionHandler:^(NSError * _Nullable error) { // never called }]; with same result - I freeze forever on waiting completion handler. So what is the correct way to disable NE without explicit deactivation it by [OSSystemExtensionRequest deactivationRequestForExtension:...]?

Hi, I'm experiencing intermittent delays with URLSession where requests take 3-4 seconds to be sent, even though the actual server processing is fast. This happens randomly, maybe 10-20% of requests. The pattern I've noticed is I create my request I send off my request using try await urlSession.data(for: request) My middleware ends up receiving this request 4-7s after its been fired from the client-side The round trip ends up taking 4-7s! This hasn't been reproducible consistently at all on my end. I've also tried ephemeral URLSessions (so recreating the session instead of using .shared so no dead connections, but this doesn't seem to help at all) Completely lost on what to do. Please help!

I have an Xcode app where currently txt files in the project display text data as a list. I can search through the lists and have buttons that will swap between different lists of information that you can look through. The next task is I have URL connections to docx files on a SharePoint site. I am trying to use an URLsession function to connect to the URL links to download the documents to the document directory then have the application read the doc information to then be displayed as the txt info would. The idea is that the docx files are a type of online update version of the data. So when the app is used and on wifi, the app can update the list data with the docx files. I have code set up that should access the URL files but I am struggling to figure out how to read the data and access from this Documents directory. I have been looking online and so far I am at a loss on where to go here. If anyone can help or provide some insight I would greatly appreciate it. I can try and provide code samples to help explain things if that is needed.

Satellite Communication framework, experiences a failure in receiving network path updates when a device transitions from Satellite to a fringe LTE area. The iOS Status Bar correctly updates to show "LTE," but our application does not receive the corresponding network path update (e.g., via NWPathMonitor). This leaves our app UI locked in "Satellite Mode," while the user sees "LTE" in the status bar, causing critical user confusion. Feedback: FB20976940

Following previous question here :https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/801397, I've decided to move my VPN implementation using NEPacketTunnelProvider on a dedicated networkExtension. My extension receives packets using readPacketsWithCompletionHandler and forwards them immediately to a daemon through a shared memory ring buffer with Mach port signaling. The daemon then encapsulates the packets with our VPN protocol and sends them over a UDP socket. I'm seeing significant throughput degradation, much higher than the tunnel overhead itself. On our side, the IPC path supports parallel handling, but I'm not not sure whether the provider has any internal limitation that prevents packets from being processed in parallel. The tunnel protocol requires packet ordering, but preparation can be done in parallel if the provider allows it. Is there any inherent constraint in NEPacketTunnelProvider that prevents concurrent packet handling, or any recommended approach to improve throughput in this model? For comparison, when I create a utun interface manually with ifconfig and route traffic through it, I observe performance that is about four times faster.

I spent the entire day debugging a network issue on my Apple Watch app, only to realize the problem isn't my code—it's Apple's inflexible design. The Context: I am building a generic MCP (Model Context Protocol) client for watchOS. The nature of this app is to allow users to input their own server URLs (e.g., a self-hosted endpoint, or public services like GitHub's MCP server) to interact with LLMs and tools. The Problem: When using standard URLSession to connect to widely trusted, public HTTPS endpoints (specifically GitHub's official MCP server at https://mcp.github.com), the connection is forcefully terminated by the OS with NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1200 (TLS handshake failed). The Analysis: This is caused by App Transport Security (ATS). ATS is enforcing a draconian set of security standards (specific ciphers, forward secrecy requirements, etc.) that many perfectly valid, secure, and globally accepted servers do not strictly meet 100%. The Absurdity: We cannot whitelist domains: Since this is a generic client, I cannot add NSExceptionDomains to Info.plist because I don't know what URL the user will input. We cannot disable ATS: Adding NSAllowsArbitraryLoads is a guaranteed rejection during App Store review for a general-purpose app without a "compelling reason" acceptable to Apple. The result: My app is effectively bricked. It cannot connect to GitHub. It cannot connect to 90% of the user's self-hosted servers. The Question: Is the Apple Watch just a toy? How does Apple expect us to build flexible, professional tools when the OS acts like a nanny that blocks connections to GitHub? We need a way to bypass strict ATS checks for user-initiated connections in generic network tools, similar to how curl -k or other developer tools work. The current "all-or-nothing" policy is suffocating.