Why does Today Widget show 'Unable to load' on iOS 14 and cannot be debugged?

Question

When running my iOS 12+ App on iOS 14 the (long existing) Today Widget does not work any more. Instead of the widget content only Unable to load is shown.

The very same code runs without any problem on iOS 13 and below.

Note: This is NOT about the new Homescreen Widgets introduced with iOS 14. They work fine. This is about the old today widgets.

I found several existing threads and other resources about the Unable to load issue. However, they are all older and not related to iOS 14. In pretty much all cases the problem was, that the widget crashed and could thus not be loaded.

I tried to debug the widget extension by running it directly from Xcode: Selecting the Widget target instead of the App target and run the project. This works fine on iOS 13 and below. The widgets becomes visible and works as expected. Additionally I can use breakpoints, etc. to check if there is any problem.

On iOS 14 however, nothing happens when I start debugging, expect that Xcode shows Running com.apple.springboard on iPhone XYZ. When I switch to the today screen manually the widget is shows as Unable to load again.

Since debugging does not work I added a method which logs messages to a file in the apps group folder. While this also works fine on iOS 13 and below, it does nothing on iOS 14.

I am working with Xcode 12.1 and as far as I can tell both iOS 14 and 14.1 are affected.

Is seems that the Widget does not run at all on iOS 14.

Any idea what the problem might be? Any idea how find the source of the issue without debugging or logging?

Answer 1

No idea about the cause but I've just updated to 14.2 and none of the non-Apple widgets will run (all show "Unable to load" or blank black widget. And most of those apps have widgets updated for iOS 14.