We are having trouble publishing our x86/x64 UWP Xamarin Forms app to the Microsoft Store.
The app got rejected because the certification team cannot test the .appxupload package because it crashes on startup.
The app only crashes when installed from the store built .appxupload package. The .appxbundle in _Test works fine and we are using it for in-house distribution and sideloading via HockeyApp.
At first we assumed that the crash was due to faulty packaging as our app uses the desktop-bridge feature to bundle a small WPF executable with it. Our first instinct was to remove the desktop bridge part and test the packaging again. After removing it, we had the same issue, the .appxupload crashed on start.
We took it one step forward and just created a new solution with a new Xamarin Forms Template project (VS 15.7.1). Without changing a single line of code we packaged the visual studio xamarin forms uwp template project for store upload. The surprise here is that the generated .appxupload also crashes exactly the same way on startup.
We decided to find out more by experimenting on the Visual Studio XF uwp template:
- Update XF to 3.1 -> still crashes
- Update .NETCore.UniversalWindows to 6.1.5 -? still crashes
- Remove XF from the project completely (including Xamarin.Forms.Init(..)) -> no more crash, but also no more content without Xamarin forms ... :(
We have researched the following posts which seem to be related to this issue:
- https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=59538
- https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/150965/xamarin-forms-project-uwp-app-dies-on-start-when-i.html
- Could not load file or assembly 'System.Private.CoreLib...'
Some of the above posts were explaining that even though the .appxupload crashes when installed locally the when downloaded and installed from the Microsoft store the package will run without a problem. Our problem with this part is that our .appxupload package needs to be tested by Microsoft before the store publish because of the desktop bridge permission. Because it crashes when locally testing it cannot be published.
Based on our experiments with the Visual Studio Xamarin forms uwp template project this seems to be an issue of UWP and Xamarin Forms together. We are not sure how to proceed. We need to get the app running from the .appxupload package so that it can be tested by the store team. Do you have any ideas/solutions for this issue?
