Earlier this morning, reports started circulating that the App Store was pushing corrupt binaries to iOS and Mac users, resulting in constant crashes of the affected apps. Marco Arment, of Instapaper fame, was one of the first to notice and very vocal — bringing the issue to the attention of many in the media and at Apple. The list of affected apps is pretty staggering, including such high profile titles as Angry Birds Space, Yahoo! Search, Google Reader and, of course, Instapaper. The number of developers affected now tops 115, so we’d hold off on those updates. For the first several hours Apple was mum on the issue, but it has finally acknowledged the problem in the support forums and even reached out to developers via email. Suspicions seem to be that the FairPlay DRM is at the root, but until we have official word from Apple we’ll refrain from laying the blame at its feet. Cupertino is working (we assume tirelessly) on a fix, which will hopefully be delivered sooner, rather than later.
Update: Apple has confirmed to AllThingsD that the problem was due to a “server that generated DRM code” and has been fixed. Affected end users are advised to delete the corrupted apps and redownload them.
Apple aware of corrupt apps issue, working on a fix (Update: Fixed!) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Jul 2012 16:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
