How to fix your iPhone’s IOS4 upgrade problems

It seems thousands of Apple fanboys across the world are encountering issues when upgrading to Apple’s newest iPhone, iPad and iPod operating system. And this is consistent with my own experience when I tried to update my ageing iPhone 3G.

On Tuesday evening iTunes told me that it was time to update to IOS 4. After immediately clicking “download and install” and waiting in anticipation as every minute passed, I sat up till 12 that evening but it seems my iPhone was just not destined to update. It would eventually finish downloading the following morning… half the planet was trying to access iTunes too as this was the first major update that came free for iPod Touch users.

The problems didn’t end there. I found pages of missing apps on my iPhone and its settings didn’t restore, showing a generic “Restore Failed” error message. Moreover on syncing, I noticed that my music failed to copy across.

When browsing TiPb, the unofficial home of everything iPhone and iPad related, I noticed that other users were reporting issues of “disappearing apps”. In fact, TiPb say there has been “11 pages” of reported IOS 4 upgrade bugs.

The most notable bugs are:

• Missing apps, with some users losing all but the “official” iPhone apps and some only losing certain apps.
• Battery discharging after a full charge and short battery lifetime.
• Email account issues such as missing accounts or accounts not updating, and in some cases no cursor to type with in email.
• Pixelated, low quality images and videos, and missing content.
• Apps crashing on IOS 4 that should be compatible, in my specific case only the standard iPhone apps worked, with all others crashing.
• Wifi that won’t connect or keeps disconnecting form the network.
• New “disk partitions” that aren’t accessible or space simply labeled as “other”.
• General system “lag” and a whole host of minor issues we won’t delve into, you can follow the TiPb’s forum here.

TiPb’s advice if you’re experiencing any issues with IOS 4 is to:

• Delete and re-sync any data or content (like pictures, movies) that seem buggy.
• Remove and re-add any services (like email accounts) that are causing issues
• Uninstall and re-install any apps that are giving you problems

And according to them if all else fails:

• Restore your iPhone clean (i.e. not from backup). Which was what eventually worked for me after half a day of struggling to get everything back on the damn thing. Yet with all the issues, still the best phone ever when it was working again.