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(Self) Killing iPod Software

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List of Mobile Device crash logs One thing that strikes me as odd is the very low quality of iPod touch software as far as stability is concerned. Of course the big number of developers flocking to the device means that many of them are incompetent and poor software comes out of that, but even iPod applications which are generally considered to be ‘good’ ones seem extremely crash happy.

While the iPod touch may be a new platform, it is also a very limited platform. The number of ways in which a user can interact with an application is extremely low. You can’t open files, you don’t have a clipboard, all the user can do is use one or more fingers to interact with the application. And - given the clumsy tools that are fingers - the user interfaces are extremely simple and only allow very few interactions. With that background one would assume that, if anything, iPod applications should run more reliably than normal Mac applications do.

But that isn’t the case. As the screenshot from my CrashReporter folder shows, applications have crashed (or been mercy killed) left and right on my iPod since I got it. Throw in a kernel panic or two on this 100% controlled hardware environment and a bunch of freezes which required me to ‘hard restart’ the device without leaving any log-traces, and the impression that’s left isn’t overly flattering.

Peeking at crashlogs suggests that resolving host names and loading stuff from the network may be particularly prone to FAIL. And peeking around more makes me wonder why an iPod touch is running something called ‘BTServer’ while finding it non-surprising but still freaky that it runs a process called ‘lockdownd’.

February 16, 2009, 22:18

Tagged as ipod touch, software.

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