Experience Builder Crashing with iOS Devices

[TravisColeHC]

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.

[VylaGrindberg]

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.

[DanFromWI]

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.

[becyr]

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

[ChrisMyers_NewQuest]

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. 

[Ke_Xu]

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,

Ke