App Clip Local Experiences have consumed my day

September 8, 2025

Okay, I have to be doing something astronomically stupid, right? This should be working? I’m playing around with an App Clip and want to just run it on the device as a test, but no matter how I set things up nothing ever works. If you see what I’m doing wrong let me know and I’ll update this, and hopefully we can save someone else in the future a few hours of banging their head!

Xcode

App Clips require some setup in App Store Connect, so Apple provides a way when you’re just testing things to side step all that: App Clip Local Experiences

I create a new sample project called IceCreamStore, which has the bundle ID com.christianselig.IceCreamStore. I then go to File > New > Target… > App Clip. I choose the Product Name “IceCreamClip”, and it automatically gets the bundle ID com.christianselig.IceCreamStore.Clip.

I run both the main target and the app clip target on my iOS 18.6 phone and everything shows up perfectly, so let’s go onto actually configuring the Local Experience.

Local Experience setup

I go to Settings.app > Developer > App Clips Testing > Local Experiences > Register Local Experience, and then input the following details:

Screenshot of iOS Settings app page for App Clip Local Experiences, with the inputted values available in text below
  • URL Prefix: https://boop.com/beep/
  • Bundle ID: com.christianselig.IceCreamStore.Clip (note thne Apple guide above says to use the Clip’s bundle ID, but I have tried both)
  • Title: Test1
  • Subtitle: Test2
  • Action: Open

Upon saving, I then send myself a link to https://boop.com/beep/123 in iMessage, and upon tapping on it… nothing, it just tries to open that URL in Safari rather than in an App Clip (as it presumably should?). Same thing if I paste the URL into Safari’s address bar directly.

I also tried generating an App Clip Code, but upon scanning it with my device I get “No usable data found”.

Help

What’s the deal here, what am I doing wrong? Is my App Store Connect account conspiring against me? I’ve tried on multiple iPhones on both iOS 18 and 26, and the incredible Matt Heaney (wrangler of App Clips) even kindly spent a bunch of time also pulling his hair out over this. We even tried to see if my devices were somehow banned from using App Clips, but nope, production apps using App Clips work fine!

If you figure this out you would be my favorite person. 😛

Update: solution. Sorta? Not really?

Okay, I took an hour off to have dinner, then reinstalled Xcode, built a totally new sample app (doing the same as above), restarted my iPhone, used a new (also fake/test) URL, and now it works sorta, but I have no idea which of the following steps made it magically come to life. It does only work via the App Clip Code method however, just trying to load it via URL in Messages is still a no-go. But it’s something!

I will say I do love how Apple stuff 99% of the time does “just work”, but dang those times when it doesn’t I really wish they showed some diagnostics I could see as to why.