App Clip Experience Does Not Update Content After Initial Creation (Persistent Caching Issue)

Question

Created 1w

Replies 5

Boosts 1

Participants 2

Hi everyone,

We’re running into a serious issue with App Clip Experience updates not propagating to devices, and I’m hoping someone here has encountered (or solved) this before.

Problem

Once an App Clip Experience is created and used on devices, subsequent updates made in App Store Connect do not reflect on any devices, even after a long period of time.

We’ve tried:

•	Updating the App Clip Experience URL (adding utm parameters, for example, utm_source and scanning via QR code)
•	Modifying Experience metadata/content
•	Waiting several days (over a week)
•	Testing on multiple devices (including devices that never opened the App Clip before)

Despite this, the App Clip continues to show the initially created content, while App Store Connect clearly shows the updated configuration.

Important Details

•	We currently have ~1,300 App Clip Experiences created
•	All App Clips use the same App Clip Bundle ID
•	The content behind the URLs updates correctly on the website
•	Only the App Clip continues to show stale / initial data
•	Removing and re-invoking the App Clip on devices does not consistently fix the issue

At this point, manual updates via App Store Connect appear to be completely ignored once the App Clip is “established.”

Questions

1.	Is there a known hard cache or CDN behavior on Apple’s side that prevents App Clip Experience updates from propagating?
2.	Is there any way to invalidate or refresh an existing App Clip Experience?
3.	Does having a large number of App Clip Experiences (~1300) affect update behavior or caching?
4.	Is the recommended approach to treat App Clip Experience as immutable and handle all updates via backend / dynamic content only?

Right now it feels like:

App Clip Experience is effectively a one-time snapshot and not a live-updatable configuration.

Any insights, confirmations, or official guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Boost

Answer 1

srgplus OP

3d

After further investigation, it appears the issue may be related to the number of App Clips (1,300 app clips). When we had around ~750 App Clip Experiences, everything worked correctly (creation, updates, activation/deactivation).

Once we added ~500 more App Clip Experiences, App Clips effectively stopped working. For the past 4 days, Apple appears to ignore all App Clip–related actions:

Creating new Experiences
Updating existing ones
Deactivating or reactivating Experiences

Nothing propagates to devices.

A possible workaround might be deactivating ~500 App Clip Experiences and testing again. However, it’s unclear whether deactivated Experiences are still counted as active on Apple’s backend, in which case nothing would change.

We’ve contacted Apple Developer Support and are waiting for guidance.

Has anyone seen similar behavior with a large number of App Clip Experiences or knows of any hard limits or backend constraints?

0

Answer 2

srgplus OP

3d

Providing a quick update on our investigation.

Today (from ~11:00 AM to ~8:00 PM), we manually deactivated ~500 App Clip Experiences and also made updates to a few others. This reduced the number of active App Clip Experiences from ~1,341 down to ~796.

We’ll wait 24–48 hours to see whether Apple’s servers start propagating updates or responding to App Clip actions again.

Hopefully App Clips haven’t entered a permanently “dead” state due to the previously high number of total App Clip Experiences. I’ll post another update once we have more data.

If somebody had any similar experience or know more deails feel free to share.

1

Answer 3

pumpkinpaul OP

2d

It seems like it's happening to everyone regardless of the number of app clips.

It's happening to us (around 2x less app clips) and I found at least two more bug reports that were filled this month. One user has only one app clip, the other one has two app clips.

What's interesting is someone else had that issue back in 2024 (https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/763374) and it eventually got fixed.

So I think that's just the same issue and needs to be fixed again, we need to get Apple's attention on this matter.

Do you mind pinging DTS Engineer at that thread from 2024?

2

Answer 4

pumpkinpaul OP

2d

How did you manage to deactivate these app clips? Do you do it via the API or did you do it manually?

1

Answer 5

srgplus OP

1d

NEW UPDATE

On December 29th at around 8:00 PM, I deactivated almost all App Clips, reducing the total from 1,341 to just 4 active App Clips. As of December 30th at 10:43 AM, there has been no change. App Clips remain completely inactive, and there are no visible signs of recovery or system response.

At this point, it feels as though the system is not functioning as expected. We will wait a couple more days to see if there are any changes.

Also we've submitted a ticket on Feedback Assistant on December 27th. Here is the ID FB21450030 - just in case Apple Development Team will see this post

Screenshot 2025-12-30 at 10.41.25 AM.png

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