How to Resolve the Error – iPhone splash screen not showing in iOS 8

Hi Guys. I recently came across an unusual error while working on an iOS app that I had a hard time resolving, so I wanted to share my experience in case anyone else encountered the same issue. The iOS app I was working on supports both landscape and portrait orientations. While working on this app, I noticed that the app’s iPhone splash screen was not showing in iOS 8 on start-up. The app’s splash screen displayed perfectly when I tested the same app on an iOS 6 device.

At first I thought the iPhone splash screen not showing in iOS 8 error was occurring due to the various sizes of the splash screen that I had added to the project, since maybe one of these image sizes was incorrect, but these were all as they should have been. Then I thought maybe it’s due to a resolution issue with the splash screen images, so to avoid any such issues, I used the splash image from one of my other apps which was displaying fine in that app. I was surprised to see that even this splash screen image did not display upon app start up. I Googled the problem but couldn’t find any info on it.

Solution – iPhone splash screen not showing in iOS 8

So in the end, to resolve the issue I removed all extra supported orientations from the project’s settings and just allowed the portrait orientation (because the iPhone supports splash screens in portrait mode only) and the splash screen displayed perfectly. This confused me even more, since there was no reason for why it wasn’t working previously.

So I took the difference of my project info.plist file to see what was different now as compared to before, and I saw that the only change was in the supported interface orientation array. I checked all the orientations available and the splash screen worked fine. Then I took the difference again and found out that the only change was that in my new info.plist, the portrait orientation was given at the top while in my old info.plist file, the landscape orientation was at the top; as I had started working with landscape mode first due to availability of assets, and had turned on portrait mode in the later stages of the project.

So basically, it means that the portrait orientation must be given at the top of the supported orientation array if you want to support splash screens in iOS 8 on the iPhone. That’s the reason for the iPhone splash screen not showing in iOS 8. Seems to me like this a major bug in iOS 8 because if anybody develops an app in landscape mode only, then he/she won’t be able to display a splash screen in their app. I hope Apple takes a note of this and resolves this bug soon.

Just thought I’d share the solution in case anyone else was facing this same problem.

 
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