I’ve been using Shopify POS on my iPad for a couple of years now. Never had a big issue.
Yesterday when I started the app it started to sync before opening the dashboard. But the sync never stopped. I read, that it could take up to 30 minutes, but it didn’t stop. I force closed the app, started it again, started to sync again. I reinstalled the app and had about 4 hours talk with Shopify support and we tried everything, but until now I still can’t work with POS. They asked me to switch on the reset button in the app settings in iOS, so that when I start the app again it would ask me for my login credentials. But it didn’t. Whenever I start the POS app it tries to continue the last (neverending) sync session. The app is since unusable.
I tried what I could find on YouTube and asked Claude for help - nothing worked.
The support team escalated it to the technical team, but up to today no answer.
Has anybody ever experienced something similar and found a solution?
Any help really appreciated.
The reinstall is most likely why the escalation has gone quiet. Shopify’s own POS troubleshooting page says do not delete and re-install Shopify POS if you experience any problems, because if you delete it you lose the app logs that are used when Shopify Support gives you technical help. So the ticket sitting with the technical team probably has no log covering the window where the sync first hung, which is the one thing they would want to read.
You can still hand them a fresh one from the stuck state. In POS tap the connectivity icon, tap This device, tap View diagnostics, then Send report. That pushes the device application logs to Shopify. Then post the time you sent it into your open ticket so somebody can match the report to your case, otherwise it lands in a pile nobody is watching.
The same menu holds the manual resync path, connectivity icon then Shopify, then Refresh under Store data and Refresh again under Products and inventory. That only helps if you can get far enough in to reach it, and from your description you probably cannot.
The test I would run before anything else is a second device. Put POS on a phone or another iPad, log into the same store and the same location. If that one syncs through, the problem is local to the iPad and the fix lives on the device. If the second device hangs at the same point, nothing you do to the iPad is going to help and it is something on the store or location side, which is a completely different ticket. Support moves a lot faster when you can tell them which of those two it is instead of asking them to work it out.
How many products are you syncing, and how many locations does that iPad have access to?
Thank you for your feedback. The reinstall was done in contact with Shopify customer support, they asked me to do it.
The problem with sending a diagnostic report is, that I don’t get to the dashboard of the POS app. When I start the app it’s trying to recover the last session and stuck in retrieving the payment providers. Every time, even after reinstalling and closing the app session on the iPad on my admin in the POS channel.
I had to install the POS app on my iPhone. At first I got an error, but with several tries it worked. The problem is that cash registers in Germany have to be fiscalized by law. So I am only allowed to use the POS app on the iPad, where I don’t get it to run any longer.
I have about 1.135 active products in my store and only one POS location.
That iPhone result is useful: because the same store and location can eventually load on another device, this no longer looks like a store-wide catalogue sync failure. The iPad stopping specifically at “retrieving payment providers” points to a device/payment-provider provisioning path.
I would give Support one compact reproduction pack:
iPad model, exact iPadOS version, and Shopify POS app version
store and POS location
timestamp and timezone when it stalls
screenshot of the exact “retrieving payment providers” state
confirmation that the same store/location loads on the iPhone, but fiscalized sales require the iPad
whether the card reader/TSE hardware is connected during startup
Then ask them to compare or reset the server-side POS device/payment-provider state for that iPad, rather than reopen a generic sync ticket. Shopify’s current baseline is iPad generation 5 or newer with iPadOS 15.1 or newer, and beta OS versions are not supported. If you use POS Hub, its iPadOS requirement is higher.
One decisive test remains: can you log the same store and location into a second supported iPad with no paired payment hardware? If that works, the fault is isolated to the original iPad/app provisioning. If it also stops at payment providers, the common layer is the location/payment setup.
Which iPad model, iPadOS version and POS app version are you on, and do you use POS Hub or a separate card-reader/TSE setup?
What stands out here is how long it took just to isolate whether this was store-wide, location-wide or device-specific.
If Shopify had surfaced something like “POS sync stalled at payment-provider provisioning on this device; same location is healthy elsewhere,” would that have materially shortened the troubleshooting process?
I’m researching operational exceptions like this because merchants often seem to spend more time identifying where the failure is than actually fixing it.
In the meantime I did a factory reset of my iPad. When restoring from a backup and opening the POS app it still had the same problem. As I needed my fiscalized iPad for instore sales today I decided to factory reset the iPad again and then install the POS app without resoring from a backup. This made the POS app work again. Unfortunately the iPad was assigned a new POS device number, meaning I had to do the whole fiscalization process again. A lot of time and work and extra cost and the Shopify support didn’t do anything for 2 days.