Missing apps in sharesheet iOS 18.1.1

Light night I came to export something from an app, something I do quite often but have not done in about a month or so, and when I click share, the first time, it is slow to show up, but after maybe 10 seconds or so, it does. However, it does not have any 3rd party apps listed. Mainly, I wanted to save it to Files, but nothing shows up. Normally I would see Files, DropBox, OneDrive, Pinterest, and a bunch of others. Now nothing. After the first slow display of the sheet, it then comes up quickly every time I try, but no change. See screen capture

It does however show up on Apple services and apps. So if I am in the Photos app, or take a screenshot and want to share it, or anything like that, then it is there.

I had been on iOS 17.6 before. Never had an issue until I noticed it last night. No idea how long it was like that, but I know it was fine about a month ago (also on 17.6)

So I upgraded to 18.1.1 last night (from iOS 17.6) in the hopes that it would fix the problem, but it does not. It is not just with that one app, the app I usually use this for, but for others as well. That is how I found out I had a problem.

What I have tried so far:

Closed all apps
Rebooted phone (more times than I can count)
Hard reset phone (vol up, vol down, and side button until reboot)
I read that adding another language would fix it. Then I should be able to go back to English. I already had French installed, so I switched to French as my primary language. I even tried to reboot at this point.
When that did not work, I switched back to English and removed French
When that did not work, I added English UK (new language never before been on my phone), but that did not work either. What happened is the share sheet did not come back up again. I tried several times, and it refused to come back up. So I went back to English. Slow to come back up the first time, and still with missing items, but at least it came back up.
I went to recently added apps and removed a few. I have about 300 apps, and over the last month, I think most of them got updates, so I am not about to uninstall half the apps on my phone in the hopes that it works. I did uninstall the last few that I know I added brand new, but same issue.
Edit Actions as seen on screenshot only shows me the items listed there, but I can reorder them. There are no other items

I also noticed that the phone got pretty warm while trying all of this.

Device: iPhone 14 Pro Currently running iOS 18.1.1

Anyone have any ideas as to what else I can try?

iPhone 14 Pro

Posted on Nov 20, 2024 4:04 AM

Top-ranking reply

Davy_ray Author

Level 1

84 points

Posted on Dec 5, 2024 5:07 AM

Someone posted a working solution on my post in Reddit. I am not sure if I can link the post, but I will cut and paste the solution here:

--------------------------------------------

Solution

A few people (myself included) have solved this by uninstalling an app. Which app is hard to say. For this person it was a printing app:

In my case I think it was an app called "TextMe"? I don't even

remember installing that but I found it by doing the following:

Open your Photos app, which for many people still has a working share sheet
Click the share button
Click "More" to see all apps available to share sheet
Pick an app and uninstall it. It's most likely a more obscure app.

To test if it's fixed you have two choices:

Option 1: Restart phone

Option 2 (faster): Add/Remove Language

Go to Settings > General > Language & Region
Add or remove a language
Click the confirm button

Share sheet is now working in all apps. What a major waste of time this has been.

--------------------------------------

My notes and observations:

in my case, the ultimate culprit was a VoIP app. I removed 3 at once (TextNow, TextMe, Talkatone). The problem was resolved. So it was one of those 3.

I will wait a few hours or a day to make sure the problem does not creep up again before reinstalling them. Apart from Talkatone, I use the other 2 on a semi-regular basis.

I took this opportunity to also remove any app on the share sheet that I no longer use or had not been updated in years from the app store. Might as well clean up the phone a little bit. I have over 300 apps.

While testing out the solution, I found my phone would get pretty warm and the battery would drain pretty quickly. When the phone was warm, I found it to be a bit sluggish, so I would wait it out to let it cool before trying more apps.

Now and then after removing the apps, I found the Share Sheet in photos stopped working altogether. I would reboot the phone to fix that problem and continue on with my testing.

So while the problem was caused by a faulty 3rd party app, I still believe there is a bug in the iOS that allowed a faulty 3rd party app to break the share sheet to begin with.

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Missing apps in sharesheet iOS 18.1.1

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