Just a black screen on the iPod touch

The other day I ran into this with a universal app. It ran fine on the iPad and on the iPhone, but produced the above when run on an iPod touch. The app would briefly show its splash screen, and then go black. My first thought was that the app had hung during initialization or it had crashed. The truth (as usual) was much simpler. As outlined in this StackOverflow post (don’t look at the answers, look at the author’s own comment on his question), the trouble is that we had specified a nib for both iPhone and iPad but not for iPod touch (this is more likely to happen if you’ve been manually messing around with your app’s plist).

You can fix it by editing the plist directly or by changing the settings under the Info tab of your target’s settings. If your settings look like this:

Either change “Main nib file base name (iPhone)” to “Main nib file base name” (this will use the same nib for both iPhone and iPod touch) or create a new entry with “Main nib file base name” (this will allow you to use a different nib for iPhone and iPod touch, although I’ve yet to notice an app that has done so).

If you already have a valid entry for “Main nib file base name”, then you have another issue altogether…