Notification Service Extension Not Triggering for Push Notifications on iOS

Question

Created Mar ’25

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I have integrated a Notification Service Extension in my app to handle rich push notifications with images. The issue occurs on iOS 15 and iOS 18 devices—while the text content of the notification shows, the image is not displayed. However, the rich push notification works fine on other iOS versions (e.g. iOS 16, iOS 17)

I’ve tried the following steps:

Verified App Groups are the same for both the main app and the extension.
Checked the "mutable-content" flag in the notification payload.
Added a print statement in the NotificationService.swift to check if it’s running. It doesn’t appear in the Xcode logs.
I’ve tried using Attach to Process in Xcode, but nothing happens.
The app is installed on a real device, and I’m testing with push notifications when the app is in the background.

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Answer 1

Engineer OP

Apple

Mar ’25

We don't have any reason to believe there should be a causal relationship between iOS 16/17 and your extension not triggering. The issue could be coincidental, or due to something specific on those devices.

If you are observing the extension not launching on these devices, the following could be happening (assuming mutable-content is included properly in all payloads):

the extension is crashing on launch
the extension is not installed properly in the build (are these the exact builds installed on all devices?)
the extension is taking too long to start up
another reason

The best way to see this is the Console log (as opposed to Xcode log). Open the Console app on the attached Mac, and start streaming the logs for the iOS device with the issue.

You can enter the Bundle ID of your app or extension in the search field, which will filter the logs that mention them. In there you should be able to see messages about your extension and determine what might have happened, whether there are errors or crashes.

You can read further about the Console app in the Console Guide

Argun Tekant /  DTS Engineer / Core Technologies

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Answer 2

mungbeans OP

Mar ’25

I've been using rich notifications with images on all these platforms without an issue. So the problem is most likely something to do with your code which for some reason only manifests with those versions.

Have you tried just simply interactively debugging the extension and checking, for example, that the image is being loaded/retrieved from wherever it is you are getting it from? Are you getting the image from the bundle? Check its not nil for example.

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