Apple Fixes Corrupt App Store Downloads

App Store icon

Late Wednesday, during the time when many were celebrating the 4th of July, the App Store began delivering corrupted apps through the App Store which caused many users to suffer app crashes and springboard resets. Many apps, such as Instapaper began to crash even after a clean install.

Instapaper creator, Marco Arment posted on his site that his own app crashed after installing, which led him to believe that there was another issue.

Twitter was the first place that many users went to complain and within hours, it became apparent that it wasn’t an issue with a specific app but with the App Store as a whole.

Arment’s post also mentioned that he believed that the corrupt update was being distributed across many regions and as a result, was affecting a number of apps and users. Some users also took to Twitter to complain that other apps such as Angry Birds Space were crashing as well. Marco Arment pinpointed some of the issues that the App Store was presenting with the corrupt downloads, and formed the following list:

  • The app crashes immediately on launch, every time, even after a delete and reinstall as long as the corrupt file is being served by the App Store.
  • It doesn’t even show the Default.png before crashing. Just a split-second of a partial fade to black, then back to Springboard.
  • It may only affect customers in some regions.
  • If updating from iTunes, some customers might get a dialog citing error 8324 or 8326.
  • Mac apps might show this dialog:
  • “[App] is damaged and can’t be opened. Delete [App] and download it again from the App Store.”
  • The console might show:AppleFairplayTextCrypterSession::fairplayOpen() failed, error -42110

Hundreds of others apps were affected, including, but not all, MeetUp, Threadnote, RedShift, as well as a number of Mac Apps. Apple has not yet commented on what caused the issue, or issued a fix for the corrupted app downloads.

Apple was quick to respond to users complaint on its support forums and after identifying the issue fixed the bug causing the crash. The company also deleted all reviews of the “current version” since the error was caused due to Apple’s server.

{via Marco.org}

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