There was a bug with a bunch of update Apple apps which caused them to crash. But Apple did find the issue and update it. Details about the DRM issue after the jump.
Apple developers received a nasty surprise earlier this week when a botched DRM update ended up crashing apps that users recently updated.
Apple issued a statement on Thursday evening explaining the bug: “We had a temporary issue that began yesterday with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded, it affected a small number of users. The issue has been rectified and we don’t expect it to occur again. Users who experienced an issue launching an app caused by this server bug can delete the affected app and re-download it.â€
Unfortunately, those updated apps suffering from the bug (totaling around 100) may have also been subject to angry users who didn’t understand that Apple, not the developers, had caused the problem and left negative reviews and low ratings for crashing apps. To amend this issue, it looks like Apple is re-updating the affected apps. The fixed binaries show up in the App Store as an update for users to download, while reviews for the “current†version of the app have been reset.
The old reviews have not been deleted; they’ve simply been moved from the “Current Version†section to the “All Versions†section of reviews. For example, Instapaper and GoodReader for iPad now have zero reviews for the current versions of the apps.
Instapaper’s Marco Arment wrote in a personal blog post that making the fixed binaries an app update is a “big deal†— in a good way. “Without that, the only easy way for customers to force their phones to download a working version was to delete the broken app and redownload it from the Store,†Arment writes. And for apps that store data locally rather than in the cloud, this update method also means users won’t risk losing their data.
