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mscriv

macrumors 601
Original poster
Aug 14, 2008
4,923
602
Dallas, Texas
Okay, so my wife and I just made the switch to At&t and got refurbished iPhones. We've had them a couple of weeks and everything has been cool so far. Well today she was showing me this new app she downloaded called Bump. I'm sure some of you are familiar with it. Basically it's a transfer app that uses the cloud to help you transfer apps, pics, files, etc. between two devices when you "bump" them together.

So, I open up the program just to check it out and press on the Apps button as if I'm going to send an app from my phone to someone else's phone. It pulls up a list of apps on my phone that I could transfer. Well, there's two apps in the list that I don't have on my phone nor have I ever installed them on my phone. They don't show up in my iTunes list of apps either. This is just really weird to me. Is it possible that these apps are somehow hidden on my phone? I'm not really sure what to do, but I want them off of my phone.

Here's a screenshot of what I'm talking about. The two apps I have never installed are the Fringe 2011 and the second Angry Birds (the lady bird one).

2zyvk9s.png


The only thing I can think of is that since my phone is a refurb could it be possible that the original owner JB'd it and put these on the device before returning it? When I got the phone it was locked up tight just like a new phone and I had to set everything up from scratch. Any ideas from anyone would be much appreciated.
 

mscriv

macrumors 601
Original poster
Aug 14, 2008
4,923
602
Dallas, Texas
Open spotlight on your phone and search for the two apps.

I tried that and it doesn't find the apps at all. That's why this is so confusing. I sent an email to the makers of the Bump app to see if they've heard of this before.

Where did you get the refurb from? AT&T or Apple? I can only see this happening if you got it from AT&T.

I got the phone through At&t, but it's from Apple as At&t doesn't handle the refurbs, they just sell them. Apple manages the refurb process on it's own. If you look at the Apple refurb store there are no iPhones as they are sold through At&t.
 

iSKW

macrumors newbie
Aug 26, 2010
17
0
Hey,

I got my iPhone 4 new from telus and when i open bump i see the fringe2011 app as well but i didnt download it, and cant find it anywhere on my phone as well. I am not a fan of this.

The crazy thing is I have restored my iphone back to factory settings and it is still there. Not sure if this is something to do with bump or what.

Anybody got any ideas on this?
 

mscriv

macrumors 601
Original poster
Aug 14, 2008
4,923
602
Dallas, Texas
Here's the response I got from Bump support:

From: support@bumptechnologies.com
Subject: Re: Confused about Apps
Date: March 12, 2011 12:41:54 AM CST

Apple doesn't provide a way to know exactly which apps you have installed on your phone, so Bump makes some educated guesses about which apps you have installed based on the information available. Sometimes we get this wrong. We're continually refining our search criteria, so hopefully we'll do better in the future.

-David

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, Bump is simply populating a list of "best guesses" as to the apps on my phone and the ones that are wrong are bad guesses, not necessarily hidden apps.

I'm not a developer or programmer, so maybe someone with that kind of experience could better explain this to us.
 

JamesMB

macrumors 68000
Jan 2, 2011
1,745
107
Texas
Here's the response I got from Bump support:



So, if I'm understanding this correctly, Bump is simply populating a list of "best guesses" as to the apps on my phone and the ones that are wrong are bad guesses, not necessarily hidden apps.

I'm not a developer or programmer, so maybe someone with that kind of experience could better explain this to us.
Sounds to me like Apple doesn't give dev's access to the file or files with the app information, so Bump is just guessing what's there.
 

iSKW

macrumors newbie
Aug 26, 2010
17
0
Sounds to me like Apple doesn't give dev's access to the file or files with the app information, so Bump is just guessing what's there.

Yep, that is correct. I just got a reponse from a bump developer and yes they have no way of an app telling what other apps are currently installed, so bump just guesses.
 

mscriv

macrumors 601
Original poster
Aug 14, 2008
4,923
602
Dallas, Texas
But, my question is, what criteria does it use to guess? I mean there has to be some matching qualifiers that are telling Bump that my iPhone has Fringe 2011 on it. It just seems odd to me that when it comes to something like this that it could be so off? I get the Angry Birds find, because I do have the original Angry Birds app on my phone, but Fringe 2011 is some app about artistic/cultural/performance events in Australia. What about my phone is telling Bump that I would have this app? :confused:
 

Howdr

macrumors regular
Dec 18, 2010
181
1
There may be a cydia app that does a better job since there are not the Apple restrictions with cydia
 

vincenz

macrumors 601
Oct 20, 2008
4,285
220
But, my question is, what criteria does it use to guess? I mean there has to be some matching qualifiers that are telling Bump that my iPhone has Fringe 2011 on it. It just seems odd to me that when it comes to something like this that it could be so off? I get the Angry Birds find, because I do have the original Angry Birds app on my phone, but Fringe 2011 is some app about artistic/cultural/performance events in Australia. What about my phone is telling Bump that I would have this app? :confused:

You never know. It's just lines of computer code guessing. Something similar happened to me when I installed Plex Media Server on my computer. It scanned all my movies and started to populate information about them. It started listing some of my movies as some popular romantic comedies that came out recently. Never had such a thing in my library.

Sometimes the metadata is just off, nothing you can do about it unless you want to fuss with it at the programming level.
 

bumptech

macrumors newbie
Mar 16, 2011
1
0
Hi guys, this is Dave, Bump CEO. I just came across this post and wanted to clarify what we do to come up with the list of apps on your phone.

Apple doesn't provide a list of apps installed on the phone that we can just display for you. What we have to do is look at some of the running processes on your phone (kind of like the task manager on a PC or a Mac), and try to infer which apps you have based on what we see in the process list. The problem is, these process names aren't unique -- so we have to make some educated guesses to get them right. For example, Angry Birds uses the same process name for all of their apps, so we don't know exactly *which* Angry Birds you have. We are pretty good at this, but every once in a while we get it wrong.

This has nothing to do with your phone. If you see an app listed in Bump that you don't have, don't worry! We're continually improving our algorithms, so we'll fix it soon. (We've already fixed the Fringe2011 bug:) ).

If you have other questions, please email us at help@bu.mp.

Best,
-dave
 

sportster

macrumors 6502
Jul 7, 2010
271
0
Katy, TX
Interesting...

I didn't even know that you could Bump apps. Me and my GF use to use Bump to send pictures, but haven't used it in a long while. I guess it may be time to put it back on the phone and update it.
 

mscriv

macrumors 601
Original poster
Aug 14, 2008
4,923
602
Dallas, Texas
Hi guys, this is Dave, Bump CEO. I just came across this post and wanted to clarify what we do to come up with the list of apps on your phone.

Apple doesn't provide a list of apps installed on the phone that we can just display for you. What we have to do is look at some of the running processes on your phone (kind of like the task manager on a PC or a Mac), and try to infer which apps you have based on what we see in the process list. The problem is, these process names aren't unique -- so we have to make some educated guesses to get them right. For example, Angry Birds uses the same process name for all of their apps, so we don't know exactly *which* Angry Birds you have. We are pretty good at this, but every once in a while we get it wrong.

This has nothing to do with your phone. If you see an app listed in Bump that you don't have, don't worry! We're continually improving our algorithms, so we'll fix it soon. (We've already fixed the Fringe2011 bug:) ).

If you have other questions, please email us at help@bu.mp.

Best,
-dave

Thanks so much for taking to time to post Dave. I have a better understanding of what is going on and appreciate the efforts to help users stay "in the know". Is the Fringe 2011 thing fixed now or is there an update coming out that will take care of it?
 
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