Glitch in Apple’s App Store Causes Issues



You may want to wait before downloading a new update to your favorite app. There is a glitch that is causing problems for people when they use Apple’s App Store to download new apps, or to update apps that they are already using. The glitch is causing a newly downloaded or updated app on an iOS device or on a Macintosh computer to crash.

This issue was first noticed by Marco Arment, who is the creator of the Instapaper app. He wrote a blog that describes how he became aware of this issue. The 4.2.3 update to Instapaper went live, and suddenly, he was getting tons of email and Twitter messages from customers who were very upset. From their perspective, it appeared that Instapaper had created a faulty update, and that this was the problem.

Arment describes, in great detail, in his blog that the new Instapaper update was not the source of the problem. Instead, this problem seems to be with how the original app files are encrypted for distribution through the app store. Arment found that some people who downloaded Instapaper, and who lived in the U.S. or the U.K. were not affected by this issue, while others were. It doesn’t appear to have affected people who use the app and who live in Australia.

Here is a list, created by Arment, of the apps that are known to have been affected by this problem: Instapaper, GoodReader, Readdle Scanner Pro, Angry Birds Space HD Free, Gaia GPS, Pair, Redshift, Flick Soccer, iBike Moto, Please Stay Calm, Pinball Maniacs, Stack the States, Threadnote, Checkout Helper, Metronome +, Phoster, Melodies Pro, MoPho, SMARTReporter (MAC), PDX Bus, CommBank Kaching, and Cincy Mobile.

It is advised that you wait until Apple resolves this issue before you download one of these apps. It is also a good idea to hold off, for now, before you update one of these apps. There could be other apps, that are not on this list, that have also been affected.