Iain Young

Hi folks,

Recently installed ios4 on my 32gb 3gs (which was a painful process by itself), and am now having so many problems with it. Slow response times, (10+ seconds to load of the text messaging app for example), much worse battery usage, and now the thing has started crashing on me during phone calls!!

I had no apps running, answered the phone, and 5 minutes into the conversation it crashed, displaying nothing but a black screen with an Apple logo on it. This happened to me 4 times last night. Had to do a hard reset each time, and each time it took about 5 minutes to reboot. Doing a google search, it seems that lots of people are having the same problem.

Does anybody know if Apple are actually working on an update to this shoddy software release? At the moment, it's gone from being the best to probably the most unreliable phone I've owned. Very unhappy. Will not be getting another iphone when my contract is up, that's for sure.

Timwinner

iTrader: (3)

I had the same issues when new upgrades were released, I wait now for about 4 months or so before I upgrade so I can get the .2 or .3 version.
It is a real disappointment as I have used apple all my life and I still swear by them, its just a pity that V1 of any upgrade they seem to release is full of bugs.

Markus

I don't see any updates on the developer portal, not sure if they would appear there anyway or wether they are just released to devs at the same time as the general public.

You say you had no apps running, had you explicitly killed all apps? I ask as with iOS4's multi-tasking when you press the home button to exit an app, well, it doesn't actually exit the app as it did under iOS3, it puts it in the background. If you exit to springboard and double-tap the home button you'll see the background tasks bar, from there you can tap and hold and then tap on an app to send a sigterm to the app, ie; kill it very ungracefully.

It is possible that some of the apps you have might not have been updated to support multi-tasking and when put into the background they aren't happy and that is a cause of the crashes. It could also be a lack of memory if you have many apps running. What should happen is that when memory gets low the OS closes apps that are in the background to free up a percentage of memory.

The black screen with apple logo isn't a good thing, that's the phone rebooting which is something I have to admit I've not seen the phone do, regardless of type or iOS version. I'm guessing instead of a kernel panic it'll just reboot.

What I'd suggest is plugging the device into iTunes and sync and see if it brings up a message about sending info to Apple, this will pull off the crash logs. When you sync iTunes should put crash logs here:

Mac OS X : ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/<DEVICE_NAME>

Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\Application Data\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/<DEVICE_NAME>

Windows Vista: C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/MobileDevice/<DEVICE_NAME>

What you might want to do is to start a thread here or find and existing one detailing your issue and pop up crash logs and see if anyone can pull useful information from them.

Markus

I don't see any updates on the developer portal, not sure if they would appear there anyway or wether they are just released to devs at the same time as the general public.

You say you had no apps running, had you explicitly killed all apps? I ask as with iOS4's multi-tasking when you press the home button to exit an app, well, it doesn't actually exit the app as it did under iOS3, it puts it in the background. If you exit to springboard and double-tap the home button you'll see the background tasks bar, from there you can tap and hold and then tap on an app to send a sigterm to the app, ie; kill it very ungracefully.

It is possible that some of the apps you have might not have been updated to support multi-tasking and when put into the background they aren't happy and that is a cause of the crashes. It could also be a lack of memory if you have many apps running. What should happen is that when memory gets low the OS closes apps that are in the background to free up a percentage of memory.

The black screen with apple logo isn't a good thing, that's the phone rebooting which is something I have to admit I've not seen the phone do, regardless of type or iOS version. I'm guessing instead of a kernel panic it'll just reboot.

What I'd suggest is plugging the device into iTunes and sync and see if it brings up a message about sending info to Apple, this will pull off the crash logs. When you sync iTunes should put crash logs here:

Mac OS X : ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/<DEVICE_NAME>

Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\Application Data\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/<DEVICE_NAME>

Windows Vista: C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/MobileDevice/<DEVICE_NAME>

What you might want to do is to start a thread here or find and existing one detailing your issue and pop up crash logs and see if anyone can pull useful information from them.

Iain Young

Hi Markus,

Yes. Double clicked the button and no apps were listed. The second crash I had, I just turned on the phone, typed in the number, and talked. Didn't run any apps beforehand. The same the for the 3rd and 4th crashes. It just hung 5-10 minutes into the phone call.


I have, and it didn't ask me anything.

I'll have a look when I get home later.

There is already a thread or two on there...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread....19070&tstart=0
http://discussions.apple.com/thread....72904&tstart=0

Coffin Dodger

Ahh the Microsoft technique - use your customers as beta testers

Seems like Apple aren't having a good run of things at the moment what with the iPhone4 debarcle

iTunes on the PC was also a pile of poo during the early days so I guess they didn't test that much either

boxst

It still is: Very slow, doesn't really adhere to window's standards and just appears buggy.

Steve

Markus

iTunes on PC isn't a lot of fun, never has been, doubt it ever will be. Windows isn't Apple's primary OS so they don't overly put a lot of effort into coding for it, which probably explains iTunes poor performance. They don't want a totally polished product as it'd overshadow the OS X version and I'm sure they use the shoddy Windows version to try and persuade people to get the Mac version and thus OS X.
Not that the Mac version is perfect, had it hang when connecting an iPad a couple of times, not sure why, and gave up trying to figure it out.

Apple is always going to get major crap when things go wrong as people expect their stuff to just work perfectly, whereas people know/expect Windows to go wrong as it's MS, and we all love to hate MS.

I do agree the iPhone 4 signal issue is interesting, am curious to really know the percentage of people it's happening for, always a case of when it works you say nothing, and it's always the bad press that people see. I'm not saying the issue does not exist, it does, and I'd like to know how a) they missed this, and b) how they are going to fix it. Some say a software update, but it's a hardware issue surely so how can software fix it?

scoobyboy

not got a problem at all on my 16gb 3gs

Neanderthal

iTrader: (6)

Also on my 16gb 3GS I've had no trouble with OS4.
If I were you I'd book an appointment with a Genius at your closest Apple store and let them sort it for you (get a replacement phone )

InvisibleMan

8gb 3G has slowed down now on OS4, slow signal, slow internet. Is it their idea to get us all to upgrade to the new model...

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

ios4 on my 3G was appalling

JackClark

The new OS is defiantly clunky on the 3G as the new features are minimal I'd be tempted to downgrade, loads of guides online. I have a feeling Apple will smooth things out next upgrade.

InvisibleMan

antenna *****-up was hilarious on the new model, suggesting there is a right and wrong way to hold the phone and we are all holding it wrong.

JackClark

Is that a royal "we"?

InvisibleMan

Apples response to bad signal, holding it wrong rather than bad design and not having antenna on top its at the bottom where you cup it with your hand. the 'correct' way is in the middle with a finger either side and horizontal in front of your face, much like on the apprentice.

anyways old news i know and posted here before im sure. hadnt seen this though IHand

Devildog

Likewise, until I

Backed up phone

Un synced everything

Ran a restore (from backup)

re-synced everything.

Its still a bit slow in loading up messages, and photo albums (appx 2 seconds) but its not clunky and everything else is pretty much as it was before just as it was before.

Geezer

I can't believe that's why it's shoddy. Not even Steve Jobs is arrogant enough to think people will shift wholesale from Windows to Mac on the strength of one app!

Actually, maybe he is

Geezer

JackClark

Is it really that bad on Windows? It was fine last time I used it but that was on a fresh install of Windows, what sort of problems do you Windows users have? To me the experience was pretty much exactly the same and I'm sure that's the result Apple strive for.

Ant

I've never had a problem on my windows machine with itunes at all, i had more problem when i got my macbook and itunes constantly crashing when i connected the iphone to the mac

JackClark

I think it's a historic thing from the time when a lot of home PC's were poorly configured or spec'd.

Ant

When the first iPods my computer only USB 1.0 it took hours fo transfer music haha