Newsstand not updating in background

The unattended background updating of Newsstand has been widely reported as unreliable. As is typical in cases such as this there is lots of finger pointing going on between Apple and the publications that use Newsstand. All you can do at this point is to wait for the parties to straighten out a buggy feature.

In the meantime, download each issue that fails to download automatically. But keep in mind that you cannot exit the application during the manual download. If you do, the download will stop.

 

The Daily on my iPad stopped automatic update yesterday. Before that, it still worked.

 

I've had several New Yorkers update automatically and at least one that did not.

It may be that the Daily experienced a glitch but from what I can tell, the following seems to be true. If an unattended background download fails for any reason (i.e. server problems from the download source, bandwidth contention timeout, etc.) the Newsstand is not equipped to retry. Instead, a particular issue has to be downloaded manually in the foreground.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that The Daily download is working again and a bit later that another publication has failed. Furthermore, since large downloads are inherently more likely to fail and there is (currently) no provision for retrying, the problems are likely to continue and to be intermittent.

 

You're right. After manually updated yesterday, today it's back to automatically updated itself again.

 

Yep, this feature is acting weird. Definitely not up to Apple's usual standards of quality and reflects poorly on the company, especially Scott Forstall who presented it so enthusiastically.

 

It accomplished its purpose. The objective was to promote subscriptions through a bait and switch free app/paid content approach and to force customers to use the feature by making it very difficult to eliminate from a home screen. Initial subscriptions are way up and Apple gets 30% of every subscription. Even better, when it fails it enables Apple and publishers to point fingers at one another. No wonder Apple was enthusiastic.

 

I suspect it might related to battery. Kind of like it won't update if battery not more than certain % but I have no proof though.

 

Which is absurdly annoying.

 

Just an update. The latest issue of the New Yorker (a double issue of almost 250mg) failed the unattended download this week on my iPad. That makes, as I recall, three of the last six issues to fail.

Considering that the unattended download feature is virtually the only benefit I get from Apple's version of the Publishers Clearing House, it continues to be very annoying.

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Actually, I doubt that it "solved the problem." The problem is intermittent and will likely crop up again.

 

Yup... "It just (sometimes) works."