Holidays such as the 4th of July are boom times for developers -- folks have a day off and are more likely to tap "Buy Now" than on a regular work day. But imagine how frustrated you might be if that new purchase crashed immediately upon launch -- and it's even worse for the developers who can't do anything about it.
On Tuesday night, developer Marco Arment pushed out a relatively minor update to Instapaper, but instead of emails and tweets of joy from customers, he began receiving a steady stream of desperate pleas as the app crashed upon launch -- even after removing it and trying again.
It's a developer's worst nightmare, especially heading into the 4th of July holiday on Wednesday when it's much trickier to reach someone at Apple to resolve the problem. As it turns out, Arment wasn't alone, and soon developers began to rally on Twitter in an effort to pinpoint what the trouble could be.
"I emailed App Review less than an hour after the update went live and yelled about it on Twitter," Arment noted Wednesday on his blog. "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."
Also affected were popular apps such as GoodReader, Angry Birds Space HD Free and Readdle's new Scanner Pro 4.1 update, with many more being listed on Arment's blog as they are discovered.
So what happened? Apparently, a perfectly good binary package pushed from developer to Apple became corrupted during distribution across both the iOS and Mac App Stores. Aside from the annoyance users face from such a problem, developers have it potentially worse, as those frustrated customers then rush to the App Store and leave bad reviews that can't be erased once Apple resolves the situation.
We should note that the problem doesn't impact all users equally -- we updated both Instapaper 4.2.3 and Scanner Pro 4.1 as soon as they were available and both apps continued to work just fine for us.
Arment notes that the only solution for afflicted users is to delete and reinstall the app once Apple begins serving up a good copy -- an unfortunate solution for users of apps like Scanner Pro, where users could potentially have files saved on the device in question. Be sure to back up your device prior to deleting an affected app!
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
