Many apps not reinstalled on iPhone after restoring from backup

[kciphone]

I restored my iPhone from backup last night. All went well, except that I'm missing about 2 pages of apps on my phone. They all appear on my iTunes screen, but weren't reinstalled on my phone. Some of them were recent downloads, but most were not. What could have caused this?

 

[vincenzo7]

I am having the same problem. The offending app/s will end up randomly installing at some other time. Starting to get annoying.

 

[-aggie-]

Are you saying that some of the apps got installed, but for some reason some others didn't?

 

[kciphone]

That's right. Some of the apps were reinstalled on the phone, and others weren't. There doesn't seem to be any pattern here (it's not just newly downloaded apps).

 

[synth3tik]

I have been having this problem for more then a few months now. All my apps in iTunes are grayed out and I can not select or unselect them. I usually have to do 4 to 5 system restores in order for it to work. When the phone comes back from restore I have to cancel the sync ASAP to be able to select any apps, otherwise I only get the apps that are default. Oh, and I can't set the phone to restore from a back up, otherwise I end up in the same spot.

It is one of the most annoying things. I also haven't even bothered looking at any new apps in over 6 months. It's even effected my use of ones I have installed.

Most importantly, it is why I am looking closely at the upcoming google phone. I am done trying to deal with this iphone.

 

[-aggie-]

That's right. Some of the apps were reinstalled on the phone, and others weren't. There doesn't seem to be any pattern here (it's not just newly downloaded apps).

My initial thought was you guys hadn't transferred purchases, but obviously that wasn't it, since you have them in iTunes.

Do you get any messages? I've had apps not get installed, but it told me that they weren't installed because I wasn't authorized on this computer (or something like that). I just deauthorized my computer and then reauthorized and they were all installed. Maybe something like that is happening to you?

 

[kciphone]

I got a message saying two of the apps weren't installed ... something about the data having been updated. (I'd have paid more attention had I known they were also not installing a bunch of other ones too. ) There were no messages about my lacking authorization. I still might try deauthorizing and reauthorizing and see if that makes a difference.

 

[kciphone]

A couple more apps installed when I synced again. I dled the rest directly from the app store on my phone.

 

[wacky4alanis]

I upgraded to a 3GS last Friday, and I had similar problems getting my Apps back. I finally figured out how to fix it... Here's my experience:

I hooked up my new iPhone 3GS, restored from backup (backup which I had made from my old 3G) and none of my apps showed up! I only had the standard iPhone apps and some weblinks. So then I noticed if you click on the iPhone in iTunes, there are a bunch of tabs in the main window. One of them is an Applications tab. I clicked on that, and there you find a picture of your iPhone screen(s) on the right, and a list of all your apps on the left. In the list if Apps, there are check boxes for which Apps you want to be synced to your iPhone. For some reason, all of mine were unchecked. So I checked all of the boxes, synced my iPhone again, and then all of the Apps appeared. Note that you can also rearrange the icon screens on this page too.

But that was not the end - I now had all of my Apps on the iPhone, but all of my old App data was still missing. At that point (after all of the Apps were on the iPhone), I did ANOTHER restore from backup (the same old 3G backup I had used he first time). After that, the Apps had been restored to the same state as they were on the 3G - data and all.

Hope this helps!

One more thing - the first thing you should do - even before making the backup of the old iPhone - is to make sure all of the Apps purchased on the iPhone actually show up in iTunes. One way to do this is "File -> Transfer purchases from iPhone". This moves purchases (songs and Apps) from the iPhone to your computer.

I think all of these issues tend to occur for people who use manual sync (which I was doing on my 3G because it was completely out of disk space).

 

[sprale]

Apparently, this is an issue that persists today, with new apps failing to install at the time of a restore. For me (OS X 10.6.8 & iTunes 11.0.2), apps that were on the iPhone and in iTunes were listed, but had a Install/Will Install box, and some that were on the iPhone prior to a backup and restore were not set to Will Install. This meant that I had to go through the entire list to make sure what I needed, and it gave me a chance to remove those that were taking up space and could be removed. This was a necessity on the 8Gb model...