I am working to add a TopShelf implementation to my tvOS app. I am also working to create a Collection View implementation that has a similar functionality from within the app. Both work fine in the simulator on my Mac but don't work when deploying to my Apple TV using TestFlight. I tried using the USB-C cable to try to capture some logs or see what is going on when the UIActivityIndicator just spins. I thought it could be related to trying to download too many images or some other networking issue. I started caching the images and again that works well in the simulator but not on the device.
When I plugged into the device and ran the app it worked as it should, even with a higher number of downloads. I later updated the version via TestFlight and was back at the same position. Right now I am in a position where the app works every time with my own view controller and the TopShelf part, but does not work at all if deployed via TestFlight. I can't get any logs to figure out what is going on because when I connect the USB cable and run the app, it starts working.
Has anyone seen similar behavior or know of any way to troubleshoot what is going on?
I was able to determine there were a couple of things going on. The first was that the simulator was setup for a build configuration of debug. I went in to Edit Scheme and changed the Build Configuration for Run to "Release." This allowed me to recreate on the simulator what I was seeing on the device. It also made it a lot easier to debug as I could easily add logs to track down where the code was hanging.
The root of the problem was that I had a while loop doing nothing while I waited for a network block to update a flag. I've used this hack in other situations and have never run into a problem. If I added one NSLog command to the while loop it would flow through fine, but with nothing in the loop it just hung even though the network dispatch was done downloading data.
To fix this, I read up on using dispatch_semaphore_wait(sema, DISPATCH_TIME_FOREVER) which solved my problem (and I'm assuming made my code a lot more reliable too).