I'm trying to get the count of how many windows an iPadOS app has 'open' (open from the user's perspective in the app switcher). This is for the sake of determining whether I should show or hide a button that takes action on every window (if there is only 1 window, the button will be hidden).
According to the documentation the proper API for this is this property on UIApplication:
// All of the representations that currently have connected UIScene instances or had their sessions persisted by the system (ex: visible in iOS' switcher)
@property(nonatomic, readonly) NSSet<UISceneSession *> *openSessions
So I print the count (only sessions with role UIWindowSceneSessionRoleApplication) when scenes are added/removed etc via appropriate lifecycle notifications like -sceneDidDisconnect: -sceneDidBecomeActive: and so forth.
What I noticed is when I add a new window scene, the count increases by one so cool, that works. But when I kill a window in the App switcher the count does not decrease. I can end up in a situation where the app has only 1 window in the app switcher but the count prints 8, so this is wrong.
So am I using the wrong API? How can I just get scene count in the app switcher? The documentation makes it seem like using 'connectedScenes' for this would be wrong because that property is not supposed to include 'archived' scenes in the app switcher (or is it?)?
I do know I can't take action on an archived scene 'yet' but I would still show the button because whether or not the scene is archived in the app switcher is a fact that remains hidden from the user. My code will take care of that later after state restoration.
Is iPadOS 26 potentially keeping scene sessions open for too long? Is there a good way to reliably detect how many scenes I have in the app switcher? Is a scene session explicitly killed by the user supposed to remain the .openSessions set?
I am testing on the Simulator FWIW. iPad 26.5.