Why is Web Inspector showing me "no inspectable applications"?

ios iphone macos web-inspector
Vish picture Vish · Feb 18, 2014 · Viewed 23.1k times · Source

Background

My company recently made a shift to app development. While developing and Q/Aing on Android was relatively painless, iOS, on the other hand is proving to be a pain.

The task involves looking at the page source of our app (which has a custom browser). I heard that Web Inspector is a great tool, so I went with it.

Problem

  • First of all, Web Inspector has been able to detect the custom browser before.
  • But quite frequently, Web Inspector's menu gives the "No Inspectable Applications" prompt.
  • This happens with the exact same version of the app that worked earlier.
  • There seems to be no trigger whatsoever; yesterday Web Inspector was working with the custom browser, and then after a few hours (during which I may have disconnected and reconnected the iPhone) it stopped working.

I have not been able to figure out why despite breaking my head for a week.

Observations

I have an iPhone 4S running iOS 7.0.4. My Mac Mini has Safari 7.0.

In the phone options

  • Web Inspector is turned on in the iPhone menu
  • All privacy modes are set to off - Do Not Track, Block Cookies, etc. (this question)
  • Javascript is turned on in the phone.

In Safari on my Mac Mini - Develop menu is enabled (obviously)

More observations

  • iOS Safari is detected by Web Inspector.

So, how do I go about debugging this? What could be a possible cause and what could be the solution?

Answer

jonfer picture jonfer · Sep 26, 2014

I was having the same problem, it was cause I was running iOS 8,fixed by updating Safari to 7.1 .

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