Oh wow I finally got it to work. Thank you so much for showing me NSLog! That gave me the output I needed to figure out what was actually going wrong! I needed to allow an exception for the connection I’m making in the plist.
I just added this to the “additional plist data” section in project settings->ios (this is for google.ca for example):
<key>NSAppTransportSecurity</key><dict><key>NSExceptionDomains</key><dict><key>google.ca</key><dict><!--Include to allow subdomains--><key>NSIncludesSubdomains</key><true/><!--Include to allow HTTP requests--><key>NSTemporaryExceptionAllowsInsecureHTTPLoads</key><true/><!--Include to specify minimum TLS version--><key>NSTemporaryExceptionMinimumTLSVersion</key><string>TLSv1.1</string></dict></dict></dict>
I removed the line breaks from above. You are amazing !
Edit: I am converting this to answer and marking it for future people having this problem.