Why doesn’t SwiftUI’s popover appear when tapping a list item?

This behavior isn’t really a bug in SwiftUI—it’s caused by how the popover modifier works when applied to views that are managed inside a List. List cells are reused and their view hierarchy is managed by SwiftUI, so attaching a popover directly to each cell can lead to unexpected behavior. In your case, when there’s only one cell the popover appears as expected because there’s no ambiguity in view reuse. With multiple items, however, the cell’s context can interfere with the popover’s presentation.

Workaround

A common solution is to attach the popover modifier to a higher‑level view (for example, the List itself) rather than on each cell. When an item is tapped, set a selection state and present the popover from the container view. For example:

SWIFTCopied
struct ContentView: View {
    let arr = [
        Item(name: "Roman", addr: "Address of Roman"),
        Item(name: "Alexa", addr: "Address of Alexa")
    ]
    @State private var selection: Item?
    
    var body: some View {
        List {
            ForEach(arr) { item in
                Text(item.name ?? "")
                    .onTapGesture {
                        selection = item
                        print("selection: \(item.name ?? "")")
                    }
            }
        }
        // Attach the popover on the List view (or its container)
        .popover(item: $selection) { item in
            Text(item.addr ?? "")
        }
    }
}

Why This Works

By moving the popover modifier to the entire List rather than each Text view, you avoid the complications due to cell reuse. Now, when an item is selected, the popover is presented using a view that isn’t managed by List’s internal reuse pool.

In summary, this behavior is a known limitation caused by the way List manages its cells and not an underlying bug in SwiftUI. Adopting the workaround above should help you achieve the desired behavior.