ARTICLE AD BOX
I am working on an ios app with a companion watchos app. The watchos app was made in 2018, it uses watchkit and has a watchkit app target and a watchkit app extension target.
When I started working on it, the app was already published and running. More importantly, the watch app was installing on the users watch automatically, when the app was installed on their phones.
I came in and made some changes, updated some things and added some smaller features. After uploading to testflight and testing the app there, we sent it for review and updated the app.
This updated app, introduced the issue that when users now downloaded the app, the watch app seems to be missing. For me, downloading this new version on either testflight or app store works fine, but whenever my boss or a new user does it, the watch app is missing.
I have tried to go back to the older version of the app I started with, but this doesn't seem to change anything. My coworker tried to do do the same thing, uploading the old version, but with a new version number and everything works like normal.
He suggested the reason was that he uses xcode 16, while I use xcode 26 and the updated xcode has some slightly different settings, which can mess it up. I later installed xcode 16 and it seems to have worked.
Then yesterday, my mac auto updated to Tahoe 26 and xcode 16 isn't available. I found a workaround and got it opened anyway, but now whenever I try to distribute the app, I get an unexpected server error. I found that that might be due to the mismatch between OS and xcode when app store connect would verify the app, but when I tried to do the same thing on my old mac, still running Sequoia, I got the same problem with server error.
In the logs for the failed distribution run i get the error:
uploadEvent='<IDEArchiveDistributionEvent: 0xba3d1e2b0; title='Upload failed', shortTitle='Upload failed', date='2026-01-21 00:20:55 +0000', errors='( "Error Domain=ContentDelivery Code=500 "An unexpected error occurred" UserInfo={IDEDistributionIssueSeverity=3, NSLocalizedDescription=An unexpected error occurred, NSLocalizedRecoverySuggestion=An unexpected error occurred on the server side. If this problem persists, please contact us. (ID: ...)}"
Does anybody have an idea of what to do? Is it actually a setting problem between xcodes? Can I not use xcode 16 to distribute anymore?
