If you use PDX Bus on your iPhone and you updated it via the App Store on July 3 or yesterday while you were waiting for festivities to start, you might want to go ahead and try to update it again.
You see, there was a little issue with the app binaries. A bunch of them were completely borked.
Marco Arment creator of Instapaper—which also got hosed in the update—got to spend his Independence Day trying to track down the cause of the mess of corrupt binaries.
Last night, within minutes of Apple approving the Instapaper 4.2.3 update, I was deluged by support email and Twitter messages from customers saying that it crashed immediately on launch, even with a clean install.
This didn’t make sense — obviously, Apple had reviewed it, and it worked for them. My submitted archive from Xcode worked perfectly. But every time I downloaded the update from the App Store, clean or not, it crashed instantly.
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.
Most important thing to note here? The developers did everything right. The problem occurred on the Apple side of the table. But guess who gets horrible reviews if their app doesn’t work? That’s right. The developers.
For more on the corrupt binaries, read Marco’s post. For more on our local angle, read the PDX Bus post or follow @pdxbus on Twitter.
UPDATE: According Sarah Perez over at TechCrunch, Apple is currently working on a fix.
(Image courtesy brx0. Used under Creative Commons.)
