Suddenly, iOS crashes with “Model building is not supported when publishing with NativeAOT. Use a compiled model”

[DonkeyKongJr]

Description

We have been working on an Android and iOS app for the last year or so and suddenly (somewhere around the 9th of July) our iOS began to break right on the EF Core initialization with the error "Model building is not supported when publishing with NativeAOT. Use a compiled model".

However, if we travel back in time and install a release via AppCenter prior that date everything works fine, but if the pull some code before that date and build it now, publish via AppCenter and install it on device the app crashes right away.

The iOS publish section for Releases are the following:

  <PropertyGroup Condition="$(TargetFramework.Contains('-ios')) and '$(Configuration)' == 'Release'">
    <CodesignKey>Some Key</CodesignKey>
    <CodesignProvision>Some Provisioing</CodesignProvision>
    <ArchiveOnBuild>True</ArchiveOnBuild>
    <UseInterpreter>True</UseInterpreter>
    <CodesignEntitlements>Platforms\iOS\Entitlements.plist</CodesignEntitlements>
    <MtouchProfiling>True</MtouchProfiling>
  </PropertyGroup>

We were on Ef-Core 8.0.2 but neither bumping it to 8.0.7 or downgrading (as some other suggested) to 8.0.1 helped in this case. I have read somewhere, that compiled models are not even supported on .NET 8, which adds up to the confusion.

We are building with Xcode 15.2 on Azure Pipelines. The Debug build works without any problems.

Android is still working fine and has no problems at all.

Steps to Reproduce

No response

Link to public reproduction project repository

No response

Version with bug

8.0.70 SR7

Is this a regression from previous behavior?

Yes, this used to work in .NET MAUI

Last version that worked well

8.0.20 SR4

Affected platforms

iOS

Affected platform versions

iOS 17.5.1

Did you find any workaround?

No.

Relevant log output

No response

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[samhouts]

Have you tried the workaround mentioned in #23577 (comment)? If it works for you, we can perhaps close this as a duplicate. Thanks!

[DonkeyKongJr]

@samhouts yes, adding

<MtouchInterpreter>all</MtouchInterpreter>

solved the problem for now. thank you.

[samhouts]

Duplicate of #23577

[Axemasta]

I am still seeing this issue with EFCore 8 and the following in my maui csproj:

<PropertyGroup Condition="$(TargetFramework.Contains('-ios')) and '$(Configuration)' == 'Release'">
	<ArchiveOnBuild>true</ArchiveOnBuild>
	<MtouchInterpreter>all</MtouchInterpreter>
	<PublishAot>false</PublishAot>
</PropertyGroup>

When building for release (only) i get the following exception at runtime:

2024-07-18 17:13:54.718136+0100 MyApp[13004:8774208] [2024-07-18 17:13:54.690 +01:00] [ERR] [DatabaseInitializer] An exception occurred initializing the database
System.InvalidOperationException: Model building is not supported when publishing with NativeAOT. Use a compiled model.

[DonkeyKongJr]

@Axemasta try adding <UseInterpreter>True</UseInterpreter> as well.

[Axemasta]

@Axemasta try adding <UseInterpreter>True</UseInterpreter> as well.

That did the trick! added bonus my dotnet publish times on the build agent went from an average of 30 minutes / 100MB ipa to 3 minutes / 50MB ipa!

[DonkeyKongJr]

Great to hear!