Was today my last iPhone restore?
Dare I hope?
This morning, just as I was set to leave for work, my wife asked me to sync her iPhone for her. “Sure, no problem,” I thought (looking back, I am not sure why I thought that…).
BAM! The thing freezes up, “Silver Apple Logo screen of death”, the whole nine yards. Immediately realizing I am now going to be at a minimum a half hour late for work, I forge ahead, wiping the iPhone clean, and beginning the restore process.
Between my wife’s 1st gen iPhone and my 3G iPhone, we have had over 23 forced restores/clean installs of our iPhones since updating to the 2.0.x firmware. Granted, I have bought a TON of apps for “review” purposes, but recently I have tried to keep my apps down to 10 or less 3rd party apps, hoping the crashes would stop. Well, they didn’t, but they DID slow down slightly.
However, it looks like there may be a light at the end of my chunnel. Rumors are now saying we may very well see the iPhone 2.1 firmware rear its hopefully not-so-ugly head at this afternoon’s “Let’s Rock” press conference, and it may even have “secret features“.
Ooohhh…
Well, here’s hoping one of those secret features is that my iPhone stops crashing twice a week.
Mines working fine, are you sure you’re not doing something wrong?
/duck 🙂
Doc, I am sorry to hear about your iPhone woes. It seems like every week you have more and more trouble. I feel bad because I have been one of the lucky ones to have minimal iPhone issues.
Hopefully you can get it worked out with the new firmware.
“No more restores” a secret feature?
NO SHIT!
Same thing happened to me. My apps had stopped working a week ago and figured I’d just grin and bare it for a week and hope the new firmware comes out.
Went to sync today – got all the way through – BOOM!!!
Phone restarts and I’m stuck at the silver apple for the FIRST TIME EVER!!!
Damn, now my restore seems to be stalling out with about 5% or so left…
This better be fixed soon. Never had so many problems, even since day 1. I’m at my wit’s end with this firmware…
I miss the pre-iphone days, when Mac sites had useful articles about Macs. Other than the Mac Chick, there’s just air on this site now. 🙁
Ah, I had the same thing happen to me this morning, I was so pissed. I had to do a full restore 5 times in the last 9 days.
Sorry Stabby, but Apple stopped making Macs about 2 years ago.
-The Doc
I have about 80 apps, and had them all working somewhat ok for a few days, saw koipond 2.1 update this morning and figured I could safely update one app, and I should have known better. Updated rebooted my iphone and caused me to do about my 15th restore. I have also had to restore my gf’s iPhone about 5 times and she is on the 1st gen.
Apple doe still make Macs. Though the machines are also known as a MBP or MB or an iMac, collectively they are still Macs . The TV ads still call them Macs too.
I was joking Ed, pointing out that Apple cares far less about its Macs than it does about iPhones and iPods.
IMHO
-The Doc
The following was captured from the iPhone 3G discussion over at macintouch.com. It seems to me that it _might_ help to remove the old versions of applications from the Apps folder on the sync computer. Set them someplace handy other than the trash. Sorry for your woes. I have about 5 apps and my iPhone works well. Safari occasionally crashes but I’ve not seen the entire phone crash for about 3 weeks.
___
John Oram
Here we go with the Apple Logo of Death again…
While I rebuild my iPhone for the second time in a week, I will entertain you with the most coherent explanation I’ve found. Basically once you get past a certain number/size of apps, an app management daemon gets killed by a poorly designed watchdog timer before it can finish. Rinse, lather, repeat, and your phone never starts.
http://iphonefreakz.com/2008/09/01/apple-logo-of-death-solution-swod/
Basically any time an app is installed or updated, an iPhone process called Springboard rebuilds the application map. But there’s a two minute watchdog timer on Springboard.
The more apps there are, or the bigger the apps are, the more likely Springboard will take longer than two minutes. Basically it’s Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. After four resets, it tries to reboot, but this usually doesn’t work other than dimming the Apple logo. Which I guess is like Prometheus getting his liver eaten out by that damn bird.
So if you are seeing the ALOD, it can’t hurt to
* a) remove some apps (I was at about four or so pages)
* b) remove some of your bigger apps — I had Ambiance (91 MB) and aSleep (180MB) so I guess I was just angering the gods. I’m lucky they didn’t turn me into a Zune or something.
Some people recommend only buying/updating apps in iTunes and never on the iPhone. Can’t comment on that, but I do know my app update count has been out of whack on my iPhone. Also, iTunes seems to keep lots of old versions of apps in the Mobile Applications folder — don’t know if those add insult to injury in terms of sync time or Springboard. Anyway, I will report back if I see more ALODs while I await 2.0.2.
The ironic part is you can temporarily fix it by jailbreaking your iPhone.
MacInTouch Reader
There are some extremely serious unaddressed problems with firmware 2.0 (including 2.0.2) on the iPhone that need to be brought to the attention of the general public. In order of decreasing gravity:
1. Installing large applications (such as the American Heritage Dictionary > 300 MB but I’ve see it happen with the popular Ambiance > 30 MB) can cause backup failures in iTunes that culiminate in a kernel panic on the iPhone. Even worse, when the backup fails and provokes a kernel panic, the iPhone will be stuck at the startup screen upon restart and can only be rescued via DFU firmware restore (and requiring setup as a “new phone”). This has been confirmed by the developer of the AHD:
http://www.enfour.com/iphone/support/faq.html
2. Suddenly apps will begin to quit when they are launched. Some maintain that this happens when one has many apps installed, but I have seen it with fewer than 3 screens of apps:
http://www.iphoneatlas.com/2008/08/28/iphone-apps-crash-on-launch-cont-the-fix/
This may or may not be related to iTunes 7.7.1. The iPhone Atlas site recommends downgrading to iTunes 7.7.0.
3. The synchronization of apps between iTunes and the iPhone breaks down, and it basically becomes impossible to update an app on the iPhone or via iTunes:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1657882
(forum with 61 posts)
Related to this is the fact that updating apps directly on the iPhone results in a loss of associated data with that app; it’s as if you installed the app from scratch.
One can only hope that Apple will fix these problems as soon as possible, because they have customers longing for the simplicity and stability of firmware 1.1.4.
Hmmm…sounds like user error. I have had my iPhone for a year now. I have probably dropped it 15 times and at least 2 of those times left a big azz gash in the side of the phone. (the first 10 times caused the case I bought to break beyond repair)
My point is, that I have not had to restore my phone once. Granted I have had to reboot more than once, but not much (20 times max). I don’t know where you went wrong. You may want to return it for repair before your warranty ends.
Good Day!
I find it ironic that the same people are whining over these software bugs as were whining that apple didn’t allow 3rd party apps when the first iPhone was released. I think apple’s reasoning at the time was that it would cause bugginess in the operating system. Now you have what you wanted all along, but can’t stop complaining over bugginess in the operating system. Idiots! Give Apple a chance to update and fix it. These things take time. In the last 30 years, Apple hasn’t left us high and dry too many times (unless you are still crying over your cube). I long for 2.1 as much as thenext guy. We get what we want Friday. Hopefully the “betching” stops, but I doubt it cause you people are never satisfied.
I was having a lot of problems with my iPhone, and each time I’d restore the firmware and a previous backup.
Well, guess the problem must have been with the backup, as last time I set it up as a new iPhone and it’s been peachy ever since!
I guess I must have had some problem, which was backed up and was getting restored every time. Now it’s gone.