PID leak in iOS development workflow

This page addresses a caveat of the on-device iOS hot-reload development workflow.

It may be relevant to you if:

• Your cannot launch more apps on your iOS device after developing a Flutter app for a while.
• You frequent launch debug-mode apps from the home screen and develop with flutter attach.
• You are seeing a warning mentioning this wiki page.

Problem

When a debug-mode app is installed on an iOS device and launched from within the device, it will leak some system resources per launch which are not reclaimed by iOS until the device restarts. You many not be able to launch apps after some point.

Solutions

There are three solutions:

• Install a release/profile build. Release and profile builds do not suffer from this issue, and only release builds can be deployed to end users via the App Store. They are also more appropriate for testing since their performance is representative of what end users will experience.
• Debug your app from a host workstation/laptop, launching it from within an IDE (such as Xcode or Visual Studio Code) or the flutter run command-line tool.
• Restart your iOS device.