iOS simulator crashes at startup (intermittently), no crashes on device

Question

My app crashes on the iPhone 6.1 Simulator. It crashes on startup, but not every time. In fact, I can't get it to crash two times in a row. Sometimes it's every other time I hit run, sometimes it's every three times I hit run. The crash is a SIGABRT and produces no error messages. I set a breakpoint on all exceptions, but it always breaks at UIApplicationMain(...) in main.m

The backtrace produces:

* thread #1: tid = 0x1c03, 0x91398a6a libsystem_kernel.dylib`__pthread_kill + 10, stop reason = signal SIGABRT
frame #0: 0x91398a6a libsystem_kernel.dylib`__pthread_kill + 10
frame #1: 0x95c31b2f libsystem_c.dylib`pthread_kill + 101
frame #2: 0x023e857b libsystem_sim_c.dylib`abort + 140
frame #3: 0x02d92b4e GraphicsServices`GSRegisterPurpleNamedPort + 348
frame #4: 0x02d9269f GraphicsServices`_GSEventInitialize + 123
frame #5: 0x02d92c1f GraphicsServices`GSEventInitialize + 36
frame #6: 0x00ee0d99 UIKit`UIApplicationMain + 600
frame #7: 0x0000277d MyApp`main(argc=1, argv=0xbffff388) + 141 at main.m:16

The app doesn't seem to crash on the device, but this is very annoying and just started recently. I've tried resetting content, restarting Xcode, restarting my computer -- no luck. Any ideas how I could debug this?

Answer 1

Yep, this happened to me with the beta 10.8.4 as well. Only solution is to stop the app, wait a couple seconds, then rebuild on the simulator. Just pressing build/run once a build is currently running is what causes this.

* Update * As of Xcode Version 4.6.3 this issue has been addressed. If anyone is still having issues please post it here.

Answer 2

Try editing the scheme and switching the debugger from LLDB to GDB (or vice versa) and see if it helps.

Answer 3

Had a very similar problem and found changing the Deployment Target from 6.0 to 5.0 fixed it for me. Obviously only if your App will work on 5.0 will this work.