Devlog: August 16, 2023
I spent the last couple of days trying to add Shared with You support. I followed a couple pretty straight forward guides:
- https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou
- https://www.avanderlee.com/swift/shared-with-you/
- https://nemecek.be/blog/187/how-to-implementing-shared-with-you-apis
It seemed easy enough. But for some reason, I couldn’t get anything to show up. I even tried with a couple vanilla apps, both SwiftUI and UIKit, and nothing.
- My universal links work.
- I’ve added the Shared with You capability.
- I’m testing on an actual device (both from Xcode and TestFlight).
- I’ve made sure the Shared with You is enabled for my app in Settings.
- I’ve tried on iOS 16 and iOS 17.
- I’ve pinned items in Messages.
- I’ve made sure it works in other apps.
I had no idea what to do.
This morning, I decided to start fresh. Made a new app from scratch, copied an apple-app-site-association file from an app I knew worked, made the necessary changes for my app, and put up a simple site on Netlify. I sent a test link to myself, and…it worked! I was elated, surprised, shocked, and confused.
I looked at the difference between the allegedly good apple-app-site-association and my own. Only one difference, one of my paths had a question mark—search/?*. I changed it to search/*, deployed my site, loaded up the app on my phone, and guess what. Like 20 links that I had been sending myself like a crazy person all flooded in. I could cry.
I can’t even remember why I had that ?. Maybe I thought it would be an extra check to make sure there was at least one character? IDK. Maybe something else will break down the line, but that’s a problem for future Sam. Not me.