Updated thread title and adding this bit...this worked fine for me, only inconvenience so far is that I haven't used the app store on the iPhone. I will load some apps from this tonight to test. I have been stable for 4 1/2 days now, even with the original version of Netshare installed and various new app syncs to iPhone. Let me stress, I had really serious problems and tried all the troubleshooting tips I could think of and found online. I was doing a restore every night for about a week. Now I'm gold. The other setting I changed was using terminal to disable auto backups. On your mac open up terminal in the Applications > Utilities folder. Quit iTunes and type this into terminal and hit enter:
Code:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true
Reopen iTunes and sync. It shouldn't take as long as it skips the backup. I was wondering if my constant canceling of the backups somehow corrupted the application data that was being copied over. You can still manually backup if you choose by right clicking or option clicking your iPhone on the left and selecting "Back Up". Its a handy trick that I love. I will try doing a backup 2 days from now after I have confirmed that the app store on the iPhone is fine. Then I will be back to normal iPhone use. I'm staggering my testing to make sure that things are stable to pinpoint the problem if anything new happens. I'm being as patient as I can with this. I'll list out real quick what I did EXACTLY to make it work, ever since the restore:
1.) Did a restore the day before
2.) Synced all files
3.) Everything worked fine until the afternoon the next day, just like always
4.) Held down an icon on the home screen until it wiggled, clicked on every (x) of every app. Halfway through iPhone reboots. Some of the deleted apps came back from the dead. About a 2/3 the way through it crashes again, reboots and have about 10 apps left. Delete the rest and reboot.
5.) Went into iPod on iPhone and confirmed that media was back!
6.) Made a list of all my apps so I could remember them
7.) Deleted every app in iTunes except Netshare and phoneSaber...moved to trash
8.) Went through my list and redownloaded them all
9.) Used terminal command to disable auto backups and shut down iTunes and rebooted my MBP
10.) Reopended iTunes and just synced new apps, not Netshare or phoneSaber
10.) Everything stable for 2 days
12.) Synced some new apps, only downloaded in iTunes
13.) Installed Netshare, original file, stable for 2 days
Future tests:
14.) Will be testing iPhone app store downloads tonight to see if that corrupts the apps
15.) Will try transferring purchases back to iTunes after 2 days
16.) Will try a back up 2 days after that
Hopefully the last 3 will work, then I will be 100% fixed. Right now I'm about 95%...just slightly inconvenient to always use iTunes to install.
Last update:
I think we may have found a solution!!
After corresponding with Steve Jobs and Dan Erlewine, Manager, iTunes & iTunes Store Customer Experience, I think we may have found a permanent fix. At least until iTunes updates to 7.7.2...lol.
Go through your iPhone and manually remove every single app by holding down on an icon until it wiggles and then press the (x) button on the corner of each one. Doing this was pretty buggy on my iPhone and needed two restarts to complete. Then go into your iTunes account and delete every single app. Before deleting, make sure that the app is still available in iTunes. Apps such as PhoneSaber and Netshare are now gone, so I saved those to test.
Basically, updating to iTunes 7.7.1 corrupts some data in the app files...probably DRM which is why your iTunes media also disappears. After removing every app, before redownloading them with no 3rd party apps on my iPhone made all my media on my iPod reappear. After redownloading the new files to iTunes on my MBP (NOT IPHONE) they all worked again. It's been a little over 3 days now and everything is still working fine. Mind you, I was doing restores EVERY DAY so this is a good sign. I also reinstalled the NetShare app that I kept and thank God it wasn't corrupted. So apparently this only affects certain apps. As to which apps, I'm not sure. It may be random. Either way my apps and media are back!
One thing that I have done though is I HAVE NOT USED THE APP STORE ON THE IPHONE. I will be testing this after I go another day using Netshare stable. There might be problems with the app store on the iPhone interfering with the DRM from 7.7.1. I have used the app store to browse apps and view them, but have only used iTunes on my MBP to install. So if you use this method and have problems, avoid the built-in app store.
I hope this helps some of you that are going through iPhone hell right now. I feel for you and this could potentially be the fix you are looking for. Apple confirmed with me that before using this method, I had used every single troubleshooting technique that they could think of. Good luck everyone!
- duke
Here is my original post in this thread:
