How To Love iPhone After “White Apple Logo Screen of Death”

I know that some of my loyal readers are totally bored with my iPhone talk, but I think that this info might benefit some of you iPhone or would-be iPhone owners to avoid some of the misery that I’ve experienced in the past few days.

DFU recovery screen

So I’ve own iPhone for about 16 days now. The first week after installing some apps, I noticed that it crashed once or twice a day. But since it came back after the cute little White Apple Logo without me doing anything, I just laughed and shrugged my shoulders and went on my business.

On Day 12 as I was showing David a fun app, it froze. This was easily resolved by resetting it, but when it happened and being a new iPhone owner, I did get panicked at first.

Then on Day 14, I was upgrading apps through iPhone’s App Store icon, and then I noticed that they never finished installing, and I couldn’t open any apps (I’d learned that it meant my iPhone was about to crash), and then one thing after another in which order that I could not remember, eventually the DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) recovery screen on the left showed up. I could not do anything (literally!) except hooking it up to iTune and being forced to upgrade to 2.0.2 with all its content and settings being wiped out.

On Day 15 (yesterday, which somehow seemed so long ago) I reinstalled some of the apps back. But then in the afternoon, the stupid me allowed iPhone’s App Store to upgrade an app and the whole downward spiral happened again… And this time it was worse than Day 14 — my iPhone got stuck in the infamous “White Apple Logo Screen of Death” and iTune couldn’t see it! I had thought that it could never be worse than Day 14, but this actually made the DFU recovery screen seem so lovable now!

After spending several fruitless hours trying to get my iPhone world back by doing my Google search, I gave up and called the tech support. Well, after talking to the mechanical voice for over 5 minutes, it informed me to call back during business hours. No help there. So I had to set up an appointment to go into an Apple Genius Bar to get it fixed. I was beyond frustrating at this point.

This morning I woke up and decided to try Google again, and somehow I bumped into the right thread by searching the right words. It turned out that this is a VERY common problem and some people already posted very help notes and even YouTube clips (please see the end).

I reposted the note here, so in case you bumped into the same problems and will get yourself unstuck in no time. But the most important thing is to avoid it at the first place. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Now I think back, I made all three mistakes in the past few days (especially #2, since the backup/sync was taking redicously long time), which might explain why my iPhone became so unhappy. Still, Apple mentioned none of them in their iPhone document or support site.

mavisXP wrote:
AVOIDING FREEZES
1. DO NOT use the App Store on the iPhone itself. Only use iTunes to install/update apps.
2. NEVER interrupt a backup or a sync.
3. After installing/upgrading apps, wait for the activity indicator (next to the 3G/wifi icon) to stop spinning before using the phone.

RECOVERING FROM A FREEZE (posted by mrbuzz)
1. Connect to iTunes via USB. Do not disconnect for rest of these steps. iTunes may appear frozen or stuck with spinning beachball….this is okay, do not Force Quit iTunes. I tried a few times w/o it being connected to iTunes and it doesn’t work.
2. Once connected, hold Home + Power until screen blinks then Apple logo comes back up.
3. Wait until Apple logo dims slightly (~5 minutes or less). Do NOT reboot until the apple logo dims.
4. Hold Home + Power again until it reboots and Apple logo comes back up.
5. After 2 min or so, the phone may vibrate once or twice. Continue waiting for the full 5 min until Apple logo dims slightly. iTunes at this stage MAY recognize the phone…do not sync or do anything in iTunes.
6. Hold Home + Power for the 3rd time until it reboots. Phone may vibrate again after 2 minutes or so. Eventually you’ll break into your Home screen.

I hope this helps. Following the tips in the first section, I have avoided having to restore for the past five or six days – and in that time, I’ve installed 47 apps, upgraded about a dozen, and uninstalled one – all with no freezing. This is following the 33 restores I had to do in the first three weeks of owning an iPhone 3G. YMMV, but a number of people are reporting the above tips (both prevention of and recovery from freezes) to be working. Good luck!!

And if you are doing an DFU restore (which didn’t seem to work for me last night but somehow by following the above instructions it happened):

DFU restore can be done by plugging the phone into the sync cable and opening itunes. Then hold Home and Power for 7sec (until the screen blacks out) then at that point you release the power button but keep holding home. Keep holding it until you see itunes detect a phone in DFU mode. From there you can restore and then use the option to restore the phone from your latest itunes backup once the firmware has been restored.

And here is a helpful YouTube clip to easy the process for you:

I still reluctantly love my iPhone even after so many unpleasant episodes and Apple’s no-trial-and-no-refund app store policy. There is very good value in iPhone until the next new thing comes along, but Apple really needs to act responsibly for all the pain and inconveniences that they’ve caused on their users. Because when the next new thing shows up with a stable platform and reliable services and friendly development environment, people will ditch iPhone and embrace the new and friendly thing.

P.S. 3 things to point out:

1. This happens to both iPhone and iPod touch.
2. The same problem will happen AGAIN, even if you replace your current iPhone with a new one.
3. Sometimes you have to restart the iTune a couple of times. This seems to happen to my Mac only not my PC. Go figure.