Are there some bad Apples in the iPhone Apps?
Apple fans may be so overly enthusiastic about their devices because Christmas comes several times a year for the faithful when Apple releases new products and makes new announcements. Heck, the rollouts should be on an iCal calendar pushed out by Cupertino HQ. In any case, the four pronged launch last week of the iPhone 3G, the 2.0 version of the iphone software, MobileMe and the iPhone/Touch Apps store gave much fodder for frustration and joy. When I upgraded my iPhone to v.2.0 and started loading up on free apps, I was a kid in a candy store. How cool!...Well that excitement lasted about a day when all of a sudden my apps were crashing left and right. I could not get anything to launch after the initial installation. Hmmm.... it turns out that its easy to forget that the iPhone is running the Mac OS X and now that applications are being installed, all sorts of "interesting" things can start happening. The two gotchas that kept my apps from launching was the fact that I did not have much space on my iPhone left over. Actually, I had just over 1 GB of space (I have an 8 GB non-3G device), but it seems that may have not been enough. The iPhone uses disk space on its solid state drive as virtual memory so it needs free space to load applications and execute them. I ended up deleting my music off the iPhone to free up space and tried launching the applications again. Then they all worked (for the most part). Some were a little sluggish as I am not running on a 3G phone and just about all the apps I have need to access the web to do their thing. So if you are having app problems, check to see how full your phone is and unload little used music or movie files to see if that helps.
The second issue is launching apps if you need to sign onto a wireless network. If you need to authenticate to the network, launching apps before you do this will cause the application to crash and in some cases the iPhone to reboot. This is understandable, but it would be nice to perhaps have a message saying the network needs to be activated before the application can be launched. Maybe this is not the problem, but after I was logged onto the network, the apps launched just fine.
Covering the problems with apps launching are the folks over at iPhone Atlas who posted a special report about troubleshooting crashing apps. There is also talk of Digital Rights Management issues or problems with Apple's firmware. A patch, v. 2.0.1, is supposedly in the works and should be imminent. One of the scapegoat apps has been the highly touted WHERE which is a location based app that feeds you information about your surroundings using the iPhones geo-referencing capabilities. It has been sluggish to work or not working at all, although some improvements have been seen. It has lots of cool potential so give it some time, both for Apple and the developers of Where.
People hold the bar pretty high for Apple. Launching a new platform is not an easy task. People can be quick to criticize the downfalls, but overall, despite the hiccups, things could have been worse with the launch of not only a new piece of hardware, but also significant software. Patience please! If users are still having problems a few weeks down the road then perhaps the gripe meter can be turned on again, but for now give it some time, take a deep breath and reboot when necessary.
Keene Haywood (University of Texas@Austin - DIIA)
