App Store Bug Corrupts Binaries; Angry Birds Crash

First time accepted submitter bargainsale writes "Many recent updates from Apple's App store are crashing immediately, including Instapaper. Instapaper's creator, Marco Arment, thinks this is due to corrupt binaries being distributed. As Angry Birds Space is among those affected, there is some hope that Apple may acknowledge the problem and fix it ..."

Re:Another Apple first

[kthreadd]

App Store is not a package manager, it's an application distribution system.

App-arently fixed

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

From the linked blog by app author Marco Arment:

I emailed App Review less than an hour after the update went live and yelled about it on Twitter. About two hours after the update went live, a correct, functional version of it started being distributed on reinstalls. As far as I know, the problem hasn't recurred since then.

I haven't yet received a response from App Review, so I don't know whether the fix was because I made noise, or simply because time passed, which may, for instance, expire a cache with the bad data.

He now just wants Apple to acknowledge that there was a problem.

If the publisher makes the last good apk available

[tepples]

This is why Apple and Android need a good way for you to easily revert to a previous version.

Android already has this. Mainstream Android devices support distribution of application packages (.apk) on the application publisher's web site.

(And no, you don't need a hosts file to get this APK.)

Happened to us

[BadPirate]

This happened to our product last week. The issue seemed to be that most users who tried to download the application were instead getting the old version (despite app store thinking the product was updated)... You could see this if you pulled the binary off the device and looked into the binary size / info.plist (all the information matched).

There were 2 work arounds we discovered:

1. Users could fix their individual application (If they're app is crashing immediately), by deleting the app, and redownloading it from iCloud (go into purchase history to find the application and download it from there, NOT the app front page).

2. Apple worked for a while on our issue but didn't come up with a resolution, instead we were able to get it back into operation by "Hitting the reset button" -- First, remove the app from sale in the store (set the available regions to none), wait until that propagates (could take a few hours) then, put it back. This fixed our issue. Hopefully now that more people are reporting this issue Apple will actually take the time to fix it.