If we were playing a local network (bonjour) game of Minecraft PE, and then stop and put the iPads away for a day, and then pick them up again and try to resume the game, we often find that the local network game doesn't show up in the game list until we force-kill MCPE. It's as though the setup for bonjour discovery gets into a bad state.

Please let me know if there's some diagnostics that I can help get. I suppose I could run dns-sd on a mac to see if the service is being registered... I would need to know MCPE's bonjour service type for that.