How To Fix Applications Crashing After Upgrading to Apple iOS5 on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch

The upgrade to Apple’s iOS 5 is a few weeks behind us now and most people are up and running on it. And, now the iPhone 4S is out in the market and more people are migrating over from older iPhones to the new iPhone 4S. I haven’t heard of…

The upgrade to Apple’s iOS 5 is a few weeks behind us now and most people are up and running on it. And, now the iPhone 4S is out in the market and more people are migrating over from older iPhones to the new iPhone 4S. I haven’t heard of too many issues as part of the upgrade process, though my upgrade on my iPhone 4 was a bit chaotic. I had to go through a restore from backup a few times (I can’t remember all of the exact particulars but it was quite involved, including a few hours of restoring all of my data and applications).

iOS5-mult-icons

However, one thing that I remember clearly was once I “thought” that I had completed my upgrade and restore from backup, I couldn’t launch ANY applications. Well, let me rephrase that. I COULD launch all of the standard base applications that came with iOS5, but none of my 3rd party applications would launch. I would click on them and then they would appear to launch but then immediately quit or crash! It was extremely frustrating!

But I figured out what the issue was and how to fix this issue of crashing applications after the upgrade.

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Essentially, I had not let the restore process complete. I had lots of applications, music, photos, data, etc. on my iPhone and since I was restoring from a previous backup, I hadn’t let the process works its way through. And the reason why I thought I was done with the restore is because of the following: there is a big but subtle different between iOS 4.x and iOS 5, synchronization on iOS 5 now takes place in the background. You are no longer greeted with the “Sync in Progress” screen.

sync-progress

The only thing that you see when you are syncing is a small icon in the top left of the iOS 5 device screen.

background-sync

So, how do you fix the application crashing issue? It’s really easy! Just make sure that you leave your iOS device plugged into your computer and syncing with iTunes until the restore from backup has fully completed. You may get a prompt if you stopped the process prematurely when you reconnect your iOS device back in asking you if you want to complete the restore. You need to do this!

For me, this took actually a few hours because I had so many applications. But once it was completed (as indicated within iTunes), all of my applications launched without issue.

So if you were upgrading to a new iPhone 4S or simply doing an upgrade from iOS 4.x to iOS 5, be patient with the restore process. Eventually, you should be up and running without issue.

iOS5 icon - HighTechDad™

Please leave a comment if you encountered this issue and if the “fix” that I outlined above corrected it.

HTD says: Did you have any issues with your upgrade?

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