watchOS 2 Complication Update Issue
21 Oct 2015Unfortunately there was a bug in v2.0.0 of Count The Days Left where the watch complication wasn’t reliably updating itself.
Fortunately the issue was interesting enough to blog about :)
What I believe was the issue - not 100% sure but it appears fixed now - is that a watchOS 2 app only has a limited budget of time where it’s allowed to update itself.
In the getNextRequestedUpdateDateWithHandler function in my complication data source class, I was telling the watch
to update once an hour. This seemed a reasonable compromise (without thinking much!) where the watch would update
itself once an hour automatically, even if the options for the countdown didn’t change - which forces a complication refresh.
However I believe that once an hour is too frequent. If you read the Apple Documentation closely, it says:
At the end of a scheduled update, ClockKit calls the getNextRequestedUpdateDateWithHandler: method to get the time for the next scheduled update. Specify a date as far into the future as you can manage. Do not ask the system to update your complication within minutes. Instead, provide data to last for many hours or for an entire day. If your budget is exhausted, the next scheduled update does not occur until after your budget is replenished.
Now obviously my count only updates once a day, so I can return in getNextRequestedUpdateDateWithHandler to next update
itself at the start of tomorrow, which means it will only automatically update once a day (but should be correct all that day!)
It appears to have worked on my watch overnight, so I’m sending a v2.0.1 to the app store today (Wed 21 Oct 2015). The last version made it past review and into the store in about 2 hours(!), but it’s unlikely to be that quick again.
Update (2015-10-29)
Turns out it was more complicated than I thought :)
Even after the fixes above the complications still intermoittently failed to update overnight. I just think the “automatic updating” is just a bit flaky.
Anyway, I’ve much improved things by putting in an additional call to update watch complication every time the iPhone app, today widget or watch app is access. I also added a background app refresh handler in the iPhone app to call the same update method when ever it is intermittently called.
All of these calls shouldn’t be too frequent - so should have a neglible effect on battery life I hope - and guarantee as much as I can the complication is up to date.
Another version has been submitted to the app store, and hopefully this one will fix the issue.
N.B. All code can be seen on GitHub