My Solution to iPhone 3G bugs and crashes...

[Mikey B]

...removing most of my 3rd party apps.

I've come to believe that it's the apps that are causing the stability issues I've been having. I ran a little "test" after my last forced-restore from trying to sync my 3G to iTunes (which ended in a beachball of death for itunes and an endless boot screen for my iPhone). When it was finished restoring, I pushed my contacts on to check the responsiveness of the Contacts app. It was amazing how responsive it was. I'm talking zero lag. When I tapped the search bar, the keyboard came up instantly and I could type without any lag at all as well as scroll through the list. Next, I re-synced my usual apps. Contacts.app was back to being extremely laggy. So, I restored once more, only synced my most essential apps, and what do you know, Contacts.app was working great. Not quite as good as when there were no apps, but a thousand times better than when I had all of my apps oon.

So, at least in one facet of the iPhone OS, the number of apps seems to come into play. I don't think ti was just coincidence. Not sure about overall stability since I'm just finishing the sync of my music and videos as I type, but we shall see.

I cut my apps down from 4 and a half pages to about 20 apps total. BIG difference.

 

[rolex54]

I have over 75 apps on my phone and my contacts app is flawless
I highly doubt its the apps, all they do is take up space, just like music and videos

 

[Mikey B]

I have over 75 apps on my phone and my contacts app is flawless
I highly doubt its the apps, all they do is take up space, just like music and videos

well, there's been a lot of talk on podcasts and forums of the problems that the 3rd party apps have been causing, so I'd consider yourself lucky.

and the apps don't just "take up space like music." music and vids don't make api calls, or interact with multi-levels of the iPhone OS. Or do really much of anything except act as data. I think you're confusing the difference between data and an actual application.

 

[HawaiiMacAddict]

Aloha Mikey B,

I was forced to restore my iPhone 3G a total of 5 times just last week. I knew there was a better way, so I sat down last Friday to think of a solution to my issue. My basic issue was the deletion of all iPod content (audio and video), photos, and the inability to run any 3rd party apps without crashing (to include Apple's Remote app). I had also noticed a bit of wonkiness with respect to upgrading some of my apps, and one apps which reported low system resources on my iPhone.

I'm still not sure if an actual causal relationship exists, but rightly or wrongly I put the blame for these issues squarely on iPhone firmware 2.0.1. The more I consider other sources for these and other issues, the more all evidence points back to the firmware.

Knowing that I did not have these issues with iPhone firmware 2.0, I began to suspect that the DRM applied to the apps themselves (by Apple) may have been firmware-specific, or that iPhone firmware 2.0.1 expected a different DRM wrapper to be present. This caused issues for apps both installed prior, and subsequent, to iPhone firmware 2.0.1.

I then thought to delete all the apps from my iPhone, disconnect the sync cable, then reconnect the sync cable to get a "stock", or clean backup. I then loaded up my iPhone with all of my "normal" app load (47 apps) and repeated the process. That way, I had an initial backup with everything. The first backup took less than 2 minutes, with the second taking around 20 minutes. The longer time was to be expected, as my iPhone had to back up the initial state of all 47 apps.

I then disconnected my sync cable and reconnected one last time. This time, the backup took once again less than two minutes. IMHO each subsequent backup will only perform an incremental backup vice a full backup, which is both desired and to be expected.

Since last Saturday, which I performed the steps detailed above, I have experienced no further deletion of iPod content and all apps have continued to run as normal. I also updated to iPhone firmware 2.0.2 without incident, so I think the rapidity of another iPhone firmware release was due to the issues caused by iPhone firmware 2.0.1.

I realize that my solution is rather convoluted and may take some time, but I know that it works 100% of the time. Of course, I may still have to complete my procedure once again, if the DRM is in fact linked to a specific firmware release, but at this point, things are looking in the opposite direction.

HawaiiMacAddict

 

[brn2ski00]

I have over 75 apps on my phone and my contacts app is flawless
I highly doubt its the apps, all they do is take up space, just like music and videos

Not necessarily. If the 3rd Party apps have hooks into other processes and native applications, then this would definitely cause some instability in the iPhone OS.