Today, the first Apple Watch Series 7 units are being delivered to customers. Launch day bugs are to be expected and it seems the Series 7 is no exception.
Customers are noticing that the icons for some third-party apps are missing, leaving blank holes on the honeycomb grid home screen. PCalc developer James Thomson has noticed that his app is one of those affected, perhaps linked to the fact that he issued an app update embedding Apple Watch Series 7 specific assets.
It’s not just app icons, complication assets also appear to be misbehaving — again depending on how the developer configured them. So if you see poorly-scaled assets in the complications on your watch face, this is why.
The likely cause is a bug on the App Store server side when apps are ‘thinned’, a process which strips out unused assets to reduce size on disk. For instance, when you download a Watch app on a Series 4 or later, the image resources for Series 3 and earlier watches are not included in the download.
For whatever reason, it appears the App Store is stripping out Series 7 assets on Series 7 watches, when it obviously shouldn’t be. Although exact cause is unconfirmed, if this is indeed the issue, you can expect Apple to reissue app updates when it resolves the problem on its end.
Did you add nice vector icons to your watch app alongside support for Series 7? Well, hope you like blank icons when your users install your apps today 😞
Doesn’t reproduce on the Series 7 simulator, fine on all my other watches. I am not pleased.
See it with @CARROT_app too. pic.twitter.com/A3WVjGDZS5
— James Thomson (@jamesthomson) October 15, 2021
