If all of your third-party App Store apps are crashing, and maybe your phone’s music library is no longer accessible, my very helpful AppleCare technician recommended the following procedure.
- Delete all the apps from the phone.
- Go into ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications, select all, and copy/paste the list of files into your favorite notetaker, so you can remember all the bloody apps in your Library. I have 99.
- Delete all the apps from iTunes, moving files to the Trash.
- REDOWNLOAD every single app from the App Store (the Store will let you redownload paid apps without recharging you).
- Re-sync the iPhone, perhaps being more particular about which apps you actually keep on the phone.
- Reconfigure all your apps, and start your games from scratch. Lovely.
This worked. What a pain, but it worked. So it appears that some application somehow got corrupted, and it screwed up the whole phone. The really annoying part is that, because of Apple’s very closed system, you can’t tell which is the offending app.
Now, only two days ago, after two great weeks of fully stable iPhone performance, the damn thing started crashing again. This time, however, I knew which certain few applications I had purchased recently, and I was able to redownload and reinstall just those, and that did the trick. At least so far.
I just can’t believe that, for all of its “walled-garden” approach, Apple couldn’t prevent one bad… er… app-le, from… umm… spoiling… no, I better not.
Note: I have found, though all of these tribulations, that it is sometimes efficacious to re-install your iPhone applications in groups, according to category. Otherwise, they go in alphabetically, which has its own appeal, but can get tedious if you’re slogging through a long list. I would love for Apple to introduce some kind of quick organizational tool for apps in iTunes that would let you choose the order for apps to appear on the home screen. Ferpetessake, they have categories built in to the App Store! Sheesh.
jjmarcus tech solutions 