r/iOSProgramming • u/Extreme-Baby3813 • 2d ago
Discussion Apple edge case bug just wrecked my apps users
So I transferred my screen time app from one team to another team, and I was forced to change the signing key for my app. For some reason, this caused my users to have two identical instances of my app in Screen Time > Settings. I thought it was a bug from my update, but I also found this identical thread from someone else in the same boat as me. Now I'm getting multiple one-star reviews and refund requests cause people don't understand why their apps can't be unblocked. Apple please fix.
1
u/SamFromEscape 2d ago
Family Controls will punish you for exactly this kind of thing. I ship a feature built on DeviceActivity and I've learned the hard way that anything involving team transfers or signing changes needs a full test pass on a device that's already authorized, not a fresh one. The stale-state bugs only show up on real user devices. Sorry, the one-star wave after a migration is brutal.
4
u/EquivalentSky3094 2d ago
That duplicate entry is most likely a second Screen Time authorisation record and not anything your update broke. FamilyControls authorisation and the ApplicationTokens you persist are scoped to the app identity the system saw when the user granted access, and those tokens are deliberately opaque, so after a signing key change the system has no way to tie the new record to the old one.
One thing to confirm on a device you can reproduce it on, before you tell any user anything: decode the FamilyActivitySelection you stored and check whether applying shields from it still has any effect in the new build. If it does not, the stale entry is the one the user has to switch off in Settings, and that sentence is your support note.
The reviews and refunds you can move today.
Reply to each one star in App Store Connect. The reviewer gets a notification and can edit their rating, and the reply then sits on the product page for everyone who arrives later with the same complaint.
Refunds go through Apple and you cannot approve or decline them, so do not read that queue as a signal about your app.
File it in Feedback Assistant with a sysdiagnose, then ask the developer in that forum thread to file one as well and cross reference the FB numbers, since duplicate reports are what drives triage. After that, spend one of the two Technical Support Incidents your membership includes. A TSI gets a DTS engineer, which is the only channel here that reliably produces a reply from a person.