I have had a response from the UE4 Bug Report team, which informed me that the issue was not an engine bug, but was due to needing to build the binaries (plugins) I wished to use. To do this I needed to use a Mac and Remote Build.
While this made sense, the fact was that the issue suddenly occurred when no different plugins were introduced, and prior to that point I was building and launching my Blueprint based project on my iOS device directly from UE4.18.3 on Windows 10 without a remote Mac involved.
What wasn’t really resolved, but I have since worked around was the issue that I could no longer build and launch the exact same project.
This appears to be a garbage collection / build cleaning issue of some kind. I was able to restore my build / launch on iOS capability thanks to Kenziko’s advice in this thread: .
Solution:
- Delete the Saved, Intermediate and Binaries folder
- In my case I also removed the two remote build lines (RemoteServerName=10.x.x.x, RSyncUsername=xxx) under iOS runtime settings in the file Config/defaultengine.ini
Everything worked again after that, so I believe the issue was garbage within one of the three folders.
My Windows > iOS Workflow (Blueprint only, without a Mac)
- Disable Slate Remote plugin (used while I edit and test)
- Build
- Launch > All iOS on MyComputer
This has been working consistently, the manual folder clean out seems to fix weird bugs that pop up. No Mac needed.