My iPhone was not a happy camper this morning. When I first turned it on, it displayed the Sad iPhone screen and then the ‘springboard has crashed’ screen indicating it is running in safe mode. I’ve had this happen before (though not very often) and usually a quick restart of springboard fixes things and I think nothing further of it.
Today, a restart of springboard made no difference – it just came straight back with another Sad iPhone and springboard has crashed notices. I restarted the iPhone – no change. Hard rebooted the iPhone – no change.
After multiple restarts of springboard and the iPhone itself, and a few hard reboots, it was clear this problem was sticking with me. So I started thinking of potential causes:
– My first thought was that there were a few jailbreak apps that I use daily that had updates awaiting them that I’d not applied. Maybe one of those was urgent. So I applied all of those – with springboard crashes and sad faces galore along the way – but this also resulted in no change on the problem itself.
– My next ‘suspect’ was any recently installed jailbreak apps – but I haven’t installed any in several days. Or recently installed App Store apps – there was only one over the last couple of days. I removed that – no change.
A quick search around via Google did not yield any magic fixes and I was getting fairly resigned to likely having to do a restore at this point. I even created a backup via AptBackup to save some effort on replacing Cydia (jailbreak apps) after a restore process.
I was taking some quick notes during all of this, so I figured before giving in to a restore I’d take a quick shot at eliminating a package at a time via Cydia and see if I could find the cause and get my sad iPhone happy again without a restore. I was not in he mood to go too far with that, as I have a large number of installed packages, but I thought it was at least worth a shot.
And … I got lucky. The very first package I removed did the trick. At the top of my installed packages list was AnyRing. As soon as I saw it, it hit me that this app had been causing some oddness on some incoming calls when trying to fire up a custom ringtone – and that Thomas had mentioned various stability issues with the same app in the past.
So I uninstalled AnyRing, and hey presto no more iPhone sadness.
Not an ideal way to start a Saturday – but a relatively quick solution so I can’t complain. I think I’ll be passing on the AnyRing app for now.
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Aha! Anyring strikes again! That bloody app disabled my phone for a good 20 minutes. Touchscreen wouldn't respond. Way too much trouble for a couple of ringtones.
THis may help for future. Not sure if your data connection was up when it was in safe mode. If so …. this would have helped pinpoint the bad app. You need syslogd and then crash-reporter from cydia. When a crash occurs you run crash-reporter which reads the syslog and then you can quickly see what app is causing the crash. I've used it a few times when trying to debug a new jailbreak mobilesubstrate or app. It then produces an output which can really help the dev fix up the issue.
I now have syslogd & crashreporter installed by default (and hidden on my SBSettings dock) and then also have the SB Settings syslog toggle so I only need to have syslog on when I need it as I think it does slow things down a little if it is on the whole time.
Just thought I'd share this 'tip/info' incase you (or someone else) needs it in future.
Thanks Mike – will be adding those straight away.
I suppose this is a great example of the downside of jailbreaking an installing untested/unrevied apps.
Maybe so – but not much of a downside in this case. The issue was resolved quickly and even a full restore and re-jailbreak was not very daunting – and this is certainly not a common occurrence by any means.
MikeCTZA, this really helped me. My suspect App was QuickStart Gold. I dl'd the Crash-reported and it prompted me to dl Syslogd and the toggle, and I discovered the suspect App. Now my icons are all over the place but at least I am not in Safe Mode. Thanks.
Great you were able to find the bad app. I've found that the iPhone developers are quite responsive to bug reports and will troubleshoot and fix the problems if you contact them with the info.
I've had mostly very good experiences with iPhone devs as well, with just a few disappointing exceptions.
Glad you got it figured out buddy. That can be a scary thing. I used to get the sad iphone all the time on my 3g, since ive upgraded to 3gs I almost never see it.
Thanks – and yeah, the 3GS seems rock solid.
Didn't think that the Anyring app was the problem..thanks for the help!
My pleasure – glad it was useful.
Same here … when I deleted AnyRing everything was ok !!!
Thanks for sharing guys !!!
Same thing just happened to me, i knew straight away it was that dodgy Anyring app that was causing the problem. Uninstalled, re-sprung and am back to normal now. Definitely won't be purchasing the full version anytime soon!!
Thank u. Thank u. Thank u!!!!!
No worries – glad if it helped.
Mike how do i do the crash reporter hing? my iphone is in sad mode and im now removing anyring… hope it helps if nopt what should i do then? oh… so it help!!!! yayyy so it helped!! i removed the Any Ring package and i its back happy! but … that means i wont have anymore nice ringtones =( should i reinstall that package or is there another one thats popular?
thanks it was the any ring! wont be getting that back … though i did love the tones =/
Wow….thank you so freaking much. Just like you I had not downloaded any jailbroken apps recently nor had I changed my theme at all for over a week and then, out of the blue, safe mode. I tried searching on the internet and all over youtube to no avail. I even uninstalled winterboard with all my themes and that didn’t change a damn thing. I also tried going into General under Settings and clicking Reset All Settings but that didn’t work easier. Saw your post, uninstalled AnyRing and voila it worked. The strange thing is is that I had never even used the AnyRing app nor was it running at the time of the crash. But damn I’m glad that it worked. Thank you so so much for posting this.
Wow, glad to hear that you are all getting this sorted out. Anyring really looks to be causing a lot of headaches.
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