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Update, July 6: This is now resolved. Go to the App Store and redownload any affected apps — they should show up in the Updates tab. Do not delete and reinstall: it’s no longer necessary and you may lose data in those apps.

Last night, within minutes of Apple approving the Instapaper 4.2.3 update, I was deluged by support email and Twitter messages from customers saying that it crashed immediately on launch, even with a clean install.

This didn’t make sense — obviously, Apple had reviewed it, and it worked for them. My submitted archive from Xcode worked perfectly. But every time I downloaded the update from the App Store, clean or not, it crashed instantly.

Lots of anxiety and research led me to the problem: a seemingly corrupt update being distributed by the App Store in many or possibly all regions.

And this is happening to other apps, not just Instapaper, updated in the last few days.

Characterizations of this issue:

• The app crashes immediately on launch, every time, even after a delete and reinstall as long as the corrupt file is being served by the App Store.
• It doesn’t even show the Default.png before crashing. Just a split-second of a partial fade to black, then back to Springboard.
• It may only affect customers in some regions.
• If updating from iTunes, some customers might get a dialog citing error 8324 or 8326.
• Mac apps might show this dialog:
  “[App] is damaged and can’t be opened. Delete [App] and download it again from the App Store.”
• The console might show: AppleFairplayTextCrypterSession::fairplayOpen() failed, error -42110

I emailed App Review less than an hour after the update went live and yelled about it on Twitter. About two hours after the update went live, a correct, functional version of it started being distributed on reinstalls. As far as I know, the problem hasn’t recurred since then.

I haven’t yet received a response from App Review, so I don’t know whether the fix was because I made noise, or simply because time passed, which may, for instance, expire a cache with the bad data.

The only fix for people with bad copies, once good copies are being served again by the App Store, is to delete and reinstall the app. (Update.)

I’ve heard reports of this happening with numerous updates released on July 3rd, 4th, and 5th. Below is a growing list of affected apps.

If you’re a developer, and you have a non-critical update pending release, I suggest waiting a few days for this to presumably get sorted out before releasing it.

Because if this happens to you, all of your most active users, the people who will install updates within hours of them becoming available, will be stopped in their tracks. They’ll think you’re careless, incompetent, and sloppy for issuing a release that doesn’t work. And they’ll leave you a lot of angry 1-star reviews.

And it’s even more serious for apps that store user-created data or game progress locally: if the only fix is to delete and reinstall the app, many users will lose their data.

Apple: This is a serious problem. It’s not isolated. Please fix this.

Known affected apps that are or were corrupted:

Update, July 5: After adding 114 apps to the list with more reports coming in every few minutes, it’s no longer practical for me to maintain the list. Obviously, this is a very widespread problem for many apps updated from July 3–5.

Apple has told a few news outlets that they’re looking into the issue.

Update, July 6: This is now resolved. Go to the App Store and redownload any affected apps — they should show up in the Updates tab. Do not delete and reinstall: it’s no longer necessary and you may lose data in those apps.