Yesterday I mentioned that some iOS apps were misbehaving or crashing after restoring data to the iPhone 5. One such was Drafts, my favourite note taking app. Well, I solved this using the good old banishing trick.
If you encounter major problems with an app and closing down and reopening doesn’t do the trick, it’s a good idea to banish it temporarily from the device. Just press on the app icon until it wobbles and the X appears in the top left corner. Then press the X and the app will be deleted from the device’s memory.
Then go to the App Store and click “Purchased/Not on This iPhone” (or iPad) and the just-deleted app will be top of the list. Click on the cloud icon and the app will reappear on the the device. Usually this overcomes any problems unless there is a known bug in the application.
In the case of Drafts I suspect the problem was caused by the missing synchronisation password. On opening the app it was probably looking for the password and then crashing because it couldn’t be found. This shouldn’t happen, of course. After restoring the Drafts application from the App Store I opened it and was taken immediately to the password setup.
Note that this peculiarity did not happen when I upgraded the iphone 4S to iOS 6, so it must be a restore-specific problem. The banishing trick is cetainly worth keeping in mind for those frustrating times when apps are not behaving.
by Mike Evans, 26 September 2012