Late Tuesday evening, Instapaper developer Marco Arment was met with a nasty surprise when some users updating to Instapaper 4.2.3 found that their updated app instantly crashed after opening. Upon investigating and hearing similar reports from other developers, Marco found that the App Store itself was corrupting app updates, leaving users with broken apps and developers with one star reviews from confused and upset customers. Writing at Marco.org, Marco addressed the issue to his audience and began gathering a large list of apps that were also affected, calling on Apple to quickly resolve the problem as developers dealt with the consequences.

On Thursday evening, Apple acknowledged the problem to AllThingsD and Macworld, informing the publications that the issue had been resolved.

Lex Friedman from Macworld writes,

Around 6:00 p.m. PT, Apple acknowledged the problem to Macworld, describing it as “a temporary issue that began yesterday with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded.” Apple added: “The issue has been rectified and we don’t expect it to occur again.”

Customers with affected applications should be able to delete and reinstall a working application through the App Store.

Additionally from Macworld,

Sources told Macworld that Apple will be removing one-star app reviews developers earned unfairly because of the company’s server issue.

As Matthew Panzarino from The Next Web points out, both Apple customers and developers have little to no recourse when problems like this occur. Developers currently have no way of effectively communicating with customers outside of developer blogs.

When the one-star reviews started rolling in, there was very little that developers could do to notify users of their app that it was an issue with Apple’s packaging of their apps, not the apps themselves. The users just saw that the app was crashing on launch and rated it accordingly.

Reinstalling applications also leads to users possibly losing information — Glasshouse Apps’ is still dealing with the aftereffects as the company prepares an app update and advises users on the best course of action that will keep their news feeds and data intact. The developers of GoodReader have also written a step-by-step guide that helps customers back up, reinstall their app, and restore data onto their devices.

While Apple has acknowledged and fixed the issues disrupting application updates on the App Store, they have not yet issued an apology to developers, nor did they want to themselves acknowledge that they’d be removing one-star app reviews apps received because of the error. If Apple should do anything more, they certainly need to reach out and apologize to developers, who’ve unfortunately had to run damage control to prevent one-star reviews and angry customers.

[Sources: Macworld via AllThingsD]

In the last 24 hours or so, a number of apps that have been updated by users have crashed on launch due to a problem presumed to be connected to the App Store’s content distribution network (CDN). A number of popular apps from Instapaper, Readdle Scanner Pro, Angry Birds Space HD Free and CommBank Kaching amongst others have been just some of the affected apps. The issue, not affecting every customer, occurs when a user updates their apps and goes to launch them but instead the app crashes before it can load.

Instapaper was one of the first to be affected by the issue with an update that went live late on July 3rd. Developer Marco Arment was instantly “deluged” by support requests complaining of instant crashes with the latest version. After a bit of digging and looking at his support requests, Marco believes it comes about due to a corrupt version of the updated app being distributed by the App Store CDN in some regions. For Instapaper the issue was resolved (a non-corrupt version propagated to all regions) within two hours but it isn’t known if it was due to Marco’s emails to the App Review team or just an issue resolved with time.

If you’re a developer, and you have a non-critical update pending release, I suggest waiting a few days for this to presumably get sorted out before releasing it. [Marco Arment]

Apple has yet to make any statement on the issue and Marco and the other developers affected by the issue have yet to receive responces from any of the developer relations groups at Apple either. You can view a tentative list of apps affected by the issue over at The Next Web and at Marco’s personal blog which also goes into detail about the issue.

It may be wise to hold off from updating any apps for the time being as well, with the issue affecting people across all regions and all different apps. If you’ve already been affected by the issue, the only real way to fix it is to delete the app and try re-installing the app – but this will only work if the app is no longer corrupted on Apple’s side.

[Sources: Marco.org and The Next Web]

Lion users trying to use Firefox 5 have seen the browser crash when loading a website that uses downloadable fonts, but a fix will be “coming soon” according to the Mozilla team. The bug in question has only been affecting users on OS X 10.7 Lion and as a result there will be a Mac-only update that will bump up the Firefox build number to 5.0.1.

According to Christopher Blizzard, the Mozilla Web platform director, they had alerted Apple to the problem in Lion but Apple did not fix the problem in the GM build released on July 1. Consequently Mozilla has “changed the font APIs that [they’re] using to newer versions which appear to fix the problem. He notes that the bug is serious enough that it is causing “severe crash problems” for Firefox 5 users on Lion.

Mozilla will also be updating Firefox 3.6 to completely disable downloadable web fonts when the browser runs on Lion because of a similar issue. Blizzard also ntoes that under Lion, 3.6 also has “scrollbar rendering issues” and urges users still running that version (which is set to enter ‘retirement’ soon) to upgrade to Firefox 5. If you are already on Lion, you can help Mozilla test the fix by downloading the latest build from the Aurora channel that already includes the fix.

[Via MacWorld]

FutureTap, developer of popular augmented reality app for iPhone Where To? we covered here, received earlier today a crash report coming from a device running iOS 5. The crash report, also posted online, doesn’t come as a total surprise in the way it confirms Apple is field-testing the new OS internally with App Store applications; however, a selector named MKUserLocationBreadCrumb indicated as the cause of the crash seems to suggest Apple made some changes in the location and map APIs, as widely speculated.

Just received the first iOS 5.0 crash report. MKUserLocationBreadCrumb sounds interesting.

Already fixed the iOS 5 crash. Now the big question: Mention in the update notes?

No further technical details have been provided by the developers, but it appears that changes made in the map APIs for iOS 5 (still referred to as “iPhone OS 5.0″ in the report) may cause obvious incompatibilities with current iOS 4-based apps. Apple is expected to officially introduce iOS 5 at the WWDC ’11 in June; rumors in the past weeks claimed Apple would offer an on-stage demo, as well as first developer betas soon after the main event. Virtual assistant software Siri, bought by Apple last year, is rumored to play a big role in iOS 5, alongside new cloud, social and location-based features. [via 9to5mac]

A considerable number of owners of the new 15” and 17” 2011 MacBook Pro’s have reported both on the Apple Discussion board and also on the MacRumors forum that their new machines are locking up and freezing when under an extensive load. For example this post by ‘brandonlive02‘ is representative of what many are complaining about;

I have a 15″ 2011 MacBook Pro with a 128 SSD. It has repeatedly frozen in the week I’ve had it – often at random points while using StarCraft II and also while trying to access Time Machine. When it freezes, sound continues and I can still move the cursor (which is sometimes the spinning ball and sometimes the regular cursor) but the computer is completely unresponsive — force quit does not work nor does anything else – have to do a hard reboot.

The issue is believed to be fairly widespread with one user reproducing it on three separate machines and another who reportedly managed to reproduce it on every new MacBook Pro at their local Apple store. This wiki outlines the various methods one can use to re-create the crash if they wish to check if their MacBook has this issue.

No complete fix has been found and the cause is still unknown but the wiki page suggests one fix of using some software to only use the integrated graphics chip of the MacBook Pro. A post in the MacRumors thread suggests that Apple is aware of the issue and that they believe it to be a firmware or driver related problem rather than a hardware issue, but this has yet to be confirmed and Apple have not issued any public statement.

[Via MacRumors]