
Corrupt App Store binaries crashing on launch - shawndumas
http://www.marco.org/2012/07/04/app-store-corrupt-binaries
======
smokey_the_bear
This is also happening to our app, Gaia GPS, and it's pretty much ruining my
holiday.

It seemed to effect US users around noon PDT, and then a batch of
international users around 5 pm PDT.

~~~
rbritton
Not part of this, but I have experienced in the past sporadic download
corruptions with users. I've never figured out the exact cause, but a
reinstall has always solved it. It's been roughly 10-15 users out of 25000 or
so purchases. My best guess is that some part of the distribution pipeline
does not fully validate the app package and re-download it if it fails.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
I've seen download corruption effecting apps from the Mac App Store.

~~~
ricardobeat
This is a tough one, but I think that should be _affecting_.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
It was a typo and I really think you should avoid correcting people's grammar
on this forum. It doesn't add anything to the discussion.

------
pooriaazimi
I noticed something even odder when I was updating Instapaper from 4.2.2 to
4.2.3 on my iPad 2, iOS 6 beta 2 yesterday: Instapaper is about 25 megabytes,
and I'm on a desperately slow network. It should've ended in no less than 5
minutes, but it just took over 15 seconds.

I'm certain that I'm on iOS 6 ( :D ), and I'm certain that I updated
Instapaper (4.2.2 crashed on lunch in iOS 6, that's why he sent out 4.2.3 and
now I can open Instapaper), and that my network _is_ slow and it shouldn't
have taken less than 5 minutes. So, what's the story? To my knowledge, delta
updates are still not available to iOS apps for some reason. And I couldn't
find anything about them in devforums/iOS 6 docs/WWDC sessions.

So, could it be relevant? Maybe they were testing delta updates by mistake and
some apps got burned?

~~~
rkudeshi
Doesn't iOS 6 add delta updates for apps? Or was that still only for system
updates?

~~~
pooriaazimi
To best of my knowledge, it's still only for OS itself. Searching for 'delta'
in devforums.apple.com and developer library doesn't seem to return anything
relevant, and I've watched or at least skimmed through most WWDC sessions and
it wasn't mentioned anywhere.

But I'm not an active iOS developer at the moment and might be mistaken, or
haven't looked enough.

------
scottchin
I have two waiting-for-review updates that have been sitting in the queue for
9 days now. This seems much longer than my past experience of 2-4 days turn-
around. I wonder if these delays are related to the corrupt updates issue.

~~~
mmsear
Does someone at Apple manually check the whole app when you submit an update?

~~~
suresk
Yes, absolutely. In fact, based on the fact that my apps frequently sit in 'In
Review' (versus 'Waiting for Review') for 12+ hours usually, it wouldn't shock
me if they had multiple people review each submission.

How much they play around with the app seems to vary - I've had odd, hard-to-
trigger bugs get my app rejected, even though they existed for several prior
versions.

Each app submission/update costs Apple a fair amount of money to review.

~~~
mikeash
The only time Apple gave out hard numbers on their review setup, a couple of
years ago, they had two reviewers check each submission, with an average of
6.5 minutes per reviewer per submission spent checking it. Obviously, that
average contains quite a bit of variation.

~~~
chubs
That checks out with my experience. Typically an app will go from 'in review'
to 'processing for the app store' in about 15 mins.

~~~
andrewljohnson
My app always takes many hours to review. There are a lot of buttons.

------
markerdmann
One of my apps went into "In Review" status at midnight (19 hours ago) and
still hasn't been rejected or approved. The rejection or approval has always
happened in less than 12 hours for me, so it seems like Apple might be holding
all approvals until they've resolved this issue. At least, I hope that's the
case... I really feel for the developers who got a slew of one-star reviews
because of this.

~~~
dave1619
I've had apps "In Review" for a couple days.

~~~
gsibble
Months here.

~~~
megablast
It is worth emailing them if it takes longer than a few days. There is a
process where after a couple of days, it should go into extended review, and
they will email you.

------
scottchin
Any developers know how to change an app update that is "Waiting for Review"
from "Automatically Release" to "Hold for Developer Release?"

~~~
bryanjclark
Just reject the binary -- better to wait a week for the update than to be in
this situation.

~~~
spaghetti
My update has been "waiting for review" for a week. I'm going to just let it
proceed. When the update goes live I'll test it and if it's corrupted I'll
just remove it from sale. Hopefully this will prevent users from updating.
Then I'll email support and wait until the issue is resolved.

~~~
bryanjclark
Don't play games with this one. If I were in your shoes, I'd pull my binary,
too.

You do _not_ want to be waiting on the App Store Review team to fix this. I'm
one of the developers in Marco's post; it's been 24 hours and all I've gotten
is a boilerplate response from the App Review team.

------
leberwurstsaft
Ugh, the need to delete the corrupt version and then install the good version
also gets rid of all user data. What a mess.

Of course, this could be fixed by slightly increasing the version number or
some other way to let iOS know that the good version is to be installed as an
update over the broken one.

------
alttab
Hopefully no one was relying on that income or those good reviews. More the
reason why developers should make sure diversify their product strategy.

------
n9com
This is actually quite common and appears to resolve itself within a few hours
after the update goes live on the app store.

------
samstave
I just updated the "CUE" app in the last few days and it crashes on launch
every single time.

------
jordanclark
Something similar has happened to me. Apple needs to address this issue
immediately.

------
taligent
I suspect the issue isn't with the store corrupting binaries but the
application servers being under heavily load and dropping connections to the
user. Begs the question why they aren't doing MD5 validation of the binaries
before launching and notifying the user.

It is 4th July holiday after all. Lot more traffic.

~~~
thought_alarm
If that were the case then it would affect all apps rather than a small
handful of apps that updated yesterday.

Christmas day is the big one for the App Store. I doubt July 4 comes very
close to that.

~~~
smokey_the_bear
July 4 is actually bigger than Christmas for our apps. We have an outdoorsy
app.

------
bobbypage
I don't think that's possible.

