I previously posted about the cool remote desktop iPhone app that lets you connect to and control a Windows machine. The other day I tried to take a screen shot of it (because it seemed like a cool thing to get a screen shot of) but when I launched the app it would show the start up page and then poof, it dropped me back to the main screen.
At first I thought it was just that app but pretty quickly I realized it was happening with every app that didn’t come loaded on the iPhone when I got it. The iPod part of the phone also didn’t recognize any music, podcasts, video, or anything else. Ugh.
I tried a few quick things hoping it was just a temporary problem. No luck. I then followed the first four options on this helpful list from Apple. Still no luck. I was wary of options five and six so I decided to search the Apple forums for help.
I searched on “all apps crashing” under the iPhone section and was surprised to find this entry titled, “All Apps crashing” from July 14, 2008. I thought for sure I had hit the jackpot since this sounded exactly like my problem. Of course there were about 8 different suggestions for how to solve the problem and I tried most of them. The idea that seemed most promising, completely removing the apps and pulling them down again from iTunes, is mostly what I tried but it didn’t work.
At that point I was basically ready to start from scratch with the phone. So I tried option five from that Apple help page, the Reset All Settings command. That did the trick! The phone started working again. Of course at that point I had already yanked all my added apps so it was almost like resetting back to factory condition.