Hi Apple Team,
We are facing an issue with Live Activities where the UI intermittently fails to render and shows a loader or blank state. After extensive debugging, we’ve identified that the failure happens during the rendering phase inside the system process (WidgetKit / liveactivitiesd), but there are no actionable signals exposed to the app.
Problem:
-
Live Activity launches successfully
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After a few updates or under certain UI conditions, it:
- stops rendering
- shows a loader / blank UI
- sometimes disappears
-
No crash logs are generated
-
No MetricKit diagnostics available for the extension
-
Console logs show:
Invalid frame dimension (negative or non-finite)Archive was nil. LiveActivity will be emptySometimes because of memory pressure too
-
The extension process appears to terminate silently
Challenge
Currently, there is no way to detect from the app side that:
- the Live Activity has failed to render
- the extension process has crashed/terminated
- the UI is no longer being updated
Questions
-
Is there any callback, delegate, or lifecycle hook that notifies when:
- a Live Activity rendering fails
- the extension process crashes or is terminated by the system?
-
Is there any recommended way to detect a “broken” Live Activity state (e.g., stuck loader / non-updating UI)?
-
Are there any diagnostic APIs or logs we can rely on in production to identify such failures?
-
Is this considered expected behavior under certain system constraints (e.g., memory/rendering limits), and if so, are there guidelines to proactively detect or mitigate it?
Goal
We want to:
- proactively detect Live Activity failure
- log it for monitoring
- optionally fallback or recover gracefully
Additional context: We fixed all the issues and the live activity is pretty stable. But asking for methods to track & fix such cases.