topic Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices in ArcGIS Experience Builder Questions

Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

TravisColeHC — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 19:31:06 GMT

Has anyone been having issues with iOS devices and Experience Builder? We transitioned our main County map to Experience Builder last October and quickly received a bunch of complaints that it was buggy and crashing. Trying with my available devices of an Android Phone and Windows Desktop we had/have no issues. We finally had an internal user contact us and figured out it was specific to iOS devices. We did more testing with old and new devices with old iOS versions and the newest and experienced issues with our application crashing. Sometimes it would crash every single time the application was accessed. Sometimes it took a bit of clicking on different features or turning widgets off and on. However, it was persistent and would eventually crash and reload.

We have been working with ESRI on a solution. They have mostly pointed to some old bugs about iOS memory limitations. We were using AGOL for this, but recently upgraded our Enterprise to 11.2 and tried some new Experience Builder applications on there and have had the same crashing issues. When testing I have noticed the applications load very slowly on iOS. I can access it multiple times and zoom in, click on a feature, reload, and do it again before the iOS device even loads the first time.

The error we usually get if we can capture it says "This webpage reloaded because a problem occurred". We have had times where the app just didn't load and it says "Load Failed". A lot of times the map just crashes and reloads back to the splash screen.

I have found a number of other posts, but no real solutions if anything has fixed the issues or helped. We did eventually simplify our mobile version of the application and use hosted feature services in AGOL. This mostly mitigated the issues, but it is still present and will crash when taxed with several layers on and selecting a feature.

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

AlejandroMari1 — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 18:40:19 GMT

Hello, we are experiencing the exact same problem. The application randomly reloads. Only happens on iOS devices, other devices are fine. Seems behavior you described and showed in your video. Seems to happen particularly when zooming to features.

Have you found a solution? Did Esri support say anything else? We had a case open with Esri support last year but they were not able to reproduce the problem on their end.

Our environment:

ExB Developer Edition 1.14

JS API: 4.29

ArcGIS Enterprise: 10.9.1

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

Jacbrod — Thu, 16 May 2024 07:57:37 GMT

Hello! Is there a solution for this problem ?

we don't know what to do with all the bugs

We use ExB 1.14

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

AlejandroMari1 — Thu, 16 May 2024 15:09:35 GMT

No solution afaik. We have an open case with Esri and they are looking into it, but no workarounds so far.

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

GetThereMapping — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 19:58:45 GMT

Having similar experience...

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

AlejandroMari1 — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 17:32:31 GMT

Esri support said that this is bug. This is the information they provided. No ETA for resolution yet:

Defect Type: Bug
Defect Number: BUG-000169078
Synopsis: When opening maps and apps in a mobile browser on iOS devices, the browser randomly refreshes after interacting with the map.
Explanation: iOS is very sensitive to memory and CPU usage, these are constantly being measured by the operating system. When the operating system determines too much pressure on the device's resources, it can trigger a browser tab to restart. Each release we try to identify and improve specific areas of the API that improve efficiency and reduce the chances of this happening.
Reproducible environments: JavaScript API 4.30 (ArcGIS Dashboards and Experience Builder) iOS (various versions and device models)
Reproducible Device Models and iOS Versions:
iPhone 13 Pro - iOS 17.4.1
iPhone 13 Pro - iOS 17.5.1
iPhone 12 mini - iOS 17.4.1
iPhone 12 mini - iOS 17.5.1
iPhone 13 Pro Max - iOS 17.5.1
iPhone 14 - iOS 16.0.1
Workaround: Limit the number of layers. Where possible, slow down the pace of panning and zooming when doing it over extended periods of time. Be aware and shutdown backgrounded apps, they are a hidden consumer of memory and CPU.

Alejandro

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

TravisColeHC — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 13:39:20 GMT

We have had to implement a bunch of workarounds to fix this issue. We are currently using mostly hosted features in the mobile version. This seems to have helped with the issue. It can still be crashed if a lot of layers are turned on and interacting with many different things, but not like it originally did. We have a separate mobile version web map that has to be maintained along with the desktop version.

However we have since had similar things happen in other applications like dashboards. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason that we can pinpoint. We have another more simple application that works just fine on all mobile devices. We tested down to only having a single layer and almost no widgets and the application I originally posted about would crash.

It does seem to be memory related, but I don't know how to justify some of the suggestions we got like basically use small data sets and don't really put much on the application, which isn't a solution we could live with.

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

SATrafficGIS — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:42:42 GMT

I have experienced this as well. I added a web scene as a map in Experience Builder and noticed that Iphones would fail when zooming in or selecting a feature on the map (low resolution - setting). I disabled the 3d portion for smaller screens and tablets on Experience Builder. Taking away the web scene has made the Experience Builder App stable for me. I kept the 3d tools and web scene enabled on desktop as a work around.

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

AlejandroMari1 — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:09:33 GMT

I just got an e-mail from Esri indicating that they won't be fixing the bug and that it's working as designed because it's a limitation outside of their control. Very disappointing. This is what I got:

As Designed	After review by the development team, it has been determined that this behavior is as designed.
Known Limit	After review by the development team, it has been determined that this issue is related to a known limitation with the software that lies outside of Esri's control.
Non-Reproducible	This issue was not reproducible when tested by the development team. Defects may be given this status when they cannot be reproduced or are no longer relevant in a development version of the software, but a specific fix was not installed to address the issue.
Will Not Be Addressed	The development team has considered the issue or request and concluded it will not be addressed.

I'll be reaching out to see if I can get a better explanation, but after a year and a half this is disappointing. There are several people on this thread that have reported the same.

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

TravisColeHC — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:22:08 GMT

It’s disappointing that this issue is still ongoing. A year and a half later, multiple GIS professionals outside of our organization we've been in contact with are continuing to experience the same problem, despite using updated versions of both ESRI and Apple software and hardware. Attributing the issue to Apple’s inability to handle large amounts of local storage or application cache doesn't seem like a sustainable explanation. More importantly, the lack of a concrete fix after all this time is frustrating and concerning.

We’ve had to continue maintaining a separate mobile version of our county’s main map viewer solely because this issue remains unresolved.

https://my.esri.com/#/support/bugs/bugs?bugNumber=BUG-000161731

https://my.esri.com/#/support/bugs/bugs?bugNumber=ENH-000165404

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

DanFromWI — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:08:57 GMT

We are using enterprise 11. 3 and publishing with pro 3.3.2 to an exb app. Unfortunately, we have the same issue with our mobile apple devices. Yes, very disappointing as our field workers are discouraged as well.

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

VylaGrindberg — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 17:10:24 GMT

You're not alone. We've had similar issues even in Map Viewer with tabs restarting on us. With roughly 30% of users using Apple devices, this isn't a sustainable (non) resolution.

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

becyr — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 13:34:30 GMT

@Ke_Xu @ShengdiZhang Will this issue be resolved anytime soon? It has been affecting both iPhone and iPad devices.

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

ChrisMyers_NewQuest — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:07:20 GMT

The official answer that I recevied from Esri regarding crashing on iOS is "expected behavior". We've been testing Microsoft Surface's as opposed to iPads and haven't had a crash yet. Seems like it must be an OS issue, but Esri did not provide specifics.

Re: Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

Ke_Xu — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 02:09:53 GMT

Hi All,

We reported this to the API team a while ago and had some discussions. As we know, iOS is more sensitive to memory and CPU usage than Android. The team made some performance improvements in JS API 4.30 where they are making less requests when zooming in and out. That should help a bit. The corresponding Portal version is 11.4. If you cannot upgrade the new version, please try using ArcGIS Developer Edition 1.15 or later with it. See the doc here: https://developers.arcgis.com/experience-builder/guide/install-guide/

The API team also provided some recommendations to not crash and make the map useful:

limit the scale range of the large point layers to force users to zoom in.
if they want to see data at small scales they can for example bin the points in hexbins.
for the road layer, they can filter features by their type to display only the major arteries, freeways, highways at small scale, and have another feature layer to display all features at large scale.
it's possible to publish a tile layer from a feature layer from the layer item page. This layer could also be used to display data at small scale, and it would even support popup.

In addition, in the June 2025 release of ArcGIS Online(Portal12.0), we add an “Automatic” option to scene quality mode by default. It is useful for 3D map. We have also made some optimizations to loading and upgrading older versions of the app.

Hopefully these will be helpful.

Thanks,