WatchOS app not downloaded from appstore

Question

alpsayin OP

Created Apr ’25

Replies 4

Boosts 0

Participants 3

This is a bit of a headscratcher. Xcode 16 fyi.

I've written a standalone watchos app (with a stub ios app). Distributes and works perfectly over Testflight. I've submitted for app store and it passed the checks an I've released it for sale.

Told my brother to use a promo code to download it and show me how it looks and report me any nuisances. He tells me there's no app neither on phone (expected) nor in watch. And he checked both the Watch ios app list and the watch.

I've gone through various GPTs and they've all told me the basic troubleshooting. That his watch might not be supported (wrong, it's a watch 10 ultra with latest updates and my min supported versions are hilariously low). They've suggested that I might not have the right keys for making it standalone set, also no. They suggested that skip_install shouldn't be set to no; also wrong I think they're thinking xcode 13 and below. The stub ios app has a dependency on watchos app and also has an embed directive. I also checked the archive and saw the watchos app embedded indeed.

Again, the app works perfectly fine when distributed over testflight. And AFAIK that's a release build which I know for a fact because I had a problem with not giving healthkit entitlements to release (that was another but minor headscratcher at the time, when it was working over direct xcode upload).

Minor detail, I've written, test(flight)ed the app in UK and in English, my brother is in Turkey.

Of course now I immediately pulled the app out of sale because I don't want people paying and getting nothing, that's gonna cause a lot of trouble. So I need any help I can get to

How to debug this without exposing the app and myself: is it possible to limit the release?
Obviously: what could be going wrong?
How the hell did I even pass app review? Is this maybe isolated to my brother's watch?

I'm more than happy to share project files and/or info.plist files(end products of them, because my plists are generated from project file).

Boost

Answer 1

alpsayin OP

Apr ’25

Minor correction to post: my SKIP_INSTALL key is set to YES. This is how xcode created the app anyways.

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Answer 2

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Apr ’25

If it is that your app doesn't show up in the App Store on your brother's Apple Watch, it's likely an app availability or discoverability issue. You might submit your question here to hopefully get help.

If it is that the app shows up in the App Store, but downloading the app to the watch fails, you can probably find a hint about the failure by capturing and analyzing a sysdiagnose. How to capture a watchOS sysdiagnose is covered here.

Best,
——
Ziqiao Chen
 Worldwide Developer Relations.

1

Answer 3

alpsayin OP

Apr ’25

Accepted Answer

Hi Ziqiao Chen, Thank you for your answer and your suggestion. That's a great one and I'm definitely keeping it in my arsenal of debug tools.

That said, my problem was so much simpler and stupider. My app was indeed successfully archived, distributed and could be downloaded successfully.

The app was purchased properly but needed to be installed by a separate user action by going into Watch's App Store app, navigating to Purchases, and then downloading it onto the watch explicitly.

Out of 6 users who tested this (some seasoned Apple and Watch users), none of them knew this and they were all so surprised that a Watch-only app needed to be explicitly installed on the watch upon purchase.

Because this is unarguably unintuitive, my fears about releasing the app and being bombarded with 0/1-star reviews have solidified. Thus, I will probably put in a few hours to develop a stub companion iOS app to

Act as a user guide
Tell the users what to do if the Watch app hasn't been installed automatically.
The fact that something will be installed onto the phone will also be a good indicator that something has happened for unaware users.

As things stand, the userflow is quite literally broken. There is nothing to tie the download of a watch-only app from the phone to downloading onto watch and firing up the app. This is -in my opinion- presents a terrible user experience. What is normally a one-tap ("Get") action for iOS apps is a massive hassle for watch-only apps.

There is an implicit expectation that the users will know that their purchased app will show on on their watch's appstore (which clearly nobody really uses). And this is buried deep under Purchases section, which is also buried inside Watch AppStore app under Account menu for which one has to scroll a lot.

I hope though Apple might change this odd userflow to either

Automatically install the Watch-only apps onto watch, or
Ask the user if they'd like to install either on the phone or on the watch, or
Tell the user how they could install.

Kindly,

p.s. Upon me figuring out what was going on, one of my users found many other watch apps waiting to be installed on his Purchases list (some from a few months ago).

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Answer 4

Frameworks Engineer OP

Apple

Apr ’25

Having lots of Watch apps not installed may be less about being Watch-only and more about whether the person has Automatic App Install switched on in the Watch app > General settings on the phone.

FWIW, there is an App Store app on Apple watch where you can search for and install any app available for watchOS directly to the watch.

Definitely file Feedback about the experience searching for and installing Watch-only apps from the iOS App Store if you find it unintuitive!

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