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iPhone bugs to make you weep: OS 3.1.3

If you are an iPhone developer – or if you know any iPhone developers – don’t upgrade your device to 3.1.3, and more importantly: don’t upgrade to the latest Xcode.

(this came out last week)

Among the regression bugs (i.e. stuff that they fixed in the previous version, but because theire process sucks, they’ve broken again), is this really annoying one:

When choosing a signing certificate, you can no longer see which profile coresponds to which app.

(if you only have a single iPhone app, that’s almost OK – although as soon as you get expired cert problems, it will cause you hell, since you’ll have no way of seeing which you’re using)

For most developers … with dozens of provisioning profiles … this makes life extremely difficult at app deployment time. Early versions of Xcode were infamous for how buggy and difficult this was. In the last version of Xcode, Apple finally did something sensible, and displayed the full info. You could read the text, and know which was which. Now … you have to manually type out 8-character random strings, and open up the profiles, and find the ones that correspond to that same random string. Ugh.

Here’s hoping that 3.2.1 isn’t long in coming, and fixing this stupidity…

4 replies on “iPhone bugs to make you weep: OS 3.1.3”

@Harald

I wish! If you find one, please let me know :)

Apple’s culture of secrecy and poor software-engineering means they don’t reveal this info publically. I’ve heard rumours that they also don’t make much (if any) use of Unit tests internally – which is partly why we tend to see such buggy core code from them.

So … any list of regression tests would have to come from developers, as a community project.

I’d heard that there were bugs with the recent OS, so when I had my phone hooked up to the computer and got the update notice, I ignored it. I figured I’d have to wait until the next update for the bugs to be fixed.

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