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Reviving iOS Widgets on Expo SDK 55 (and Why They Went Black)

· One min read
Mike Homol
Mike Homol
Principal Consultant @ ThreeWill

Home-screen widgets for Memento Mori came back to life on Expo SDK 55 — but not before a stretch of black squares that looked like a React layout bug and were actually an extension packaging problem.

What happened​

  • Rebuilt widgets against Expo SDK 55 with expo-widgets patches and EAS multi-target signing
  • Black widgets traced to JS bundle copy into ExpoWidgetsTarget.appex, postinstall idempotency, and extension runtime symbols
  • Hardened TestFlight / IPA CI gates so widget regressions fail earlier
  • Current home-screen set is readable again — life % ring, weekly check-ins, and Dreams vs time — after the black-widget era
  • Smart Record is active again (not gated off for release): speak stream-of-consciousness reflections and get a bulleted summary; in final testing ahead of app go-live

Memento Mori home-screen widgets after the Expo SDK 55 fix

Smart Record — talk freely, get a bulleted reflection summary