Apple Mistakenly Serves Up Buggy iOS Apps

Corrupt updates have been distributed this week by the App Store review team in many regions around the world, according to Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper. Arment advises fellow developers to wait a few days until the waters clear.

After discovering that his newly-updated Instapaper was crashing on launch for many of his customers, Arment decided to do some digging up, to get to the bottom of the issue.

“Lots of anxiety and research led me to the problem: a seemingly corrupt update being distributed by the App Store in many or possibly all regions,” he wrote on his blog.

The app crashed immediately on launch, and it appeared to be an App Store bug, rather than something he had overlooked.

Reports then came in that several other apps were experiencing this as well. Arment mentioned such names as GoodReader, Redshift, Flick Soccer, iBike Moto, Metronome+, and others.

Arment advises fellow developers who have non-critical updates pending release to wait a few days “for this to presumably get sorted out before releasing it.”

He also explains why this is a good practice in the App Store ecosystem, saying, “Because if this happens to you, all of your most active users, the people who will install updates within hours of them becoming available, will be stopped in their tracks.”

“They’ll think you’re careless, incompetent, and sloppy for issuing a release that doesn’t work. And they’ll leave you a lot of angry 1-star reviews,” says Arment.

However, it appears that at least for Instapaper, the problem is already gone.

“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,” wrote Arment. “As far as I know, the problem hasn’t recurred since then.”