The wai-aiting is the hardest part.

January 5, 2011 2:24 PM

My iPhone has been apparently loading an app for hours now. No going forward and no going back. Suggestions?

I loaded a few apps onto my iPhone 4 this afternoon and one seems stuck. Usually when one loads a new app, the icon shows with a little status bar superimposed during the few seconds that it is installing, while the word "Waiting..." appears beneath the icon, to be replaced by the name of the app once it is fully loaded.

In this case, though, we have a grey icon-shaped box with a black, empty status bar and the word "Waiting..." beneath it.

A trip back to the app store tells me the thing has been installed already. Attempts to delete it will let me delete every app but that one. The in-progress app's icon can be moved around like any other icon. The phone seems to be working fine, save that I now have a blank, dead icon that I cannot get rid of.

I was doing it through the home wireless, and the three or four other ones I added (both before and after this one) came though fine. Turning the phone off then on does nothing to budge it, nor does shutting off the wireless.

Any suggestions? My next impulse is take it into an Apple store and maybe someone there can sort it out... I would be grateful if some kind mefite could save me the trip.

posted by ricochet biscuit to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Tap the icon. That will unpause it.
posted by flaterik at 2:28 PM on January 5, 2011

Reboot the phone, and it will probably either go away or show up as fully loaded. At least in my experience.
posted by procrastination at 2:33 PM on January 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Happened to me yesterday. I revolted the phone and it showed up.

(OMG, rebooted! Autocorrect FTW!)
posted by mollymayhem at 2:49 PM on January 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yeah, a hard reset has solved this problem for me before. Hold down the power and home button until the phone redisplays the Apple icon (i.e., after it's gone off and back on again). It'll probably end up no longer in a folder if it was in one before, and will be at the end of your app list like any other newly-installed app.
posted by zombieflanders at 2:54 PM on January 5, 2011

Reboot worked. Thanks, all!
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:02 PM on January 5, 2011

You already solved it (great!), but for future googlers:
This happened to me the other day. A grey app icon was stuck on 'waiting' for over an hour. Suggestions I found googling around were: try and pause the download, turn off the iphone (hold the power button and slide the red bar) and turn it on again, restart the iphone by pressing and holding both the power button and the home button, and syncing your phone to iTunes.

I did everything except the last one (didn't have a computer nearby), and none of it worked. I let it sit an hour or two and then the next time I unlocked it, the app had loaded. The moral of this story is, be patient I guess.
posted by Gordafarin at 5:24 AM on January 6, 2011