Update apps on jailbroken iPhone 3GS

April 11, 2013 5:18 AM

I have a jailbroken iPhone 3GS and the FB, Twitter and Instagram apps either keep crashing or malfunction. Cannot seem to update. Is there a way to revert to an older version of these apps compatible with this old model?

I have a jailbroken iPhone 3GS and have been able to install the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram apps with success, and have been using them for the better part of a year. In the past month or so they all seem to crash upon opening, or in Instagram's case, simply will not allow me to post pictures. I have tried updating, to no avail. Is it that my phone does not support the latest versions of these apps, or does this have to do with its 'jailbroken' status? Is there a way to revert to an older version of these apps compatible with this old model?

Any and all tips greatly appreciated!

posted by hollypolly to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

What version of the OS are you using?

Often, newer versions of apps will require newer versions of the OS, even if it's a version that isn't supported on your phone.

Sometimes you can get around that by jailbreaking, but then you'll get the behavior you see: some features don't work at all, general instability, etc.
posted by Oktober at 8:11 AM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: There are a lot of people using those apps without problems on jailbroken iPhone 3GSes with recent iOS versions (iOS 5 and 6), so I don't think the old model or the jailbreak are the cause. (It's part of my job to keep tabs on the problems people are having with jailbroken devices, and I haven't seen widespread problems like this.) If you're using an older iOS version (iOS 3 or 4), compatibility still shouldn't be a problem, since the App Store won't let you install an app if its developers have stated that it's not compatible with your iOS version. (It's possible that developers haven't tested their apps properly on the older versions, but that's less likely with major companies like these.) If you happened to install those apps from a less-legitimate source (aka a pirate source), that check doesn't happen, so you might end up with incompatible apps - but I'd guess that you aren't doing that, especially since they're free apps.

Something else could be going wrong though. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all require a reasonable amount of available memory to run successfully, and iPhone 3GSes don't have much memory built in. If almost all your memory is being used by other apps and then you try to open Facebook, Facebook might crash since there's not enough memory for it to run (iOS is designed to automatically manage memory to avoid crashing apps like that, but it's not perfect). You can test whether low memory is the cause by rebooting your device and then opening Facebook - if it works immediately after rebooting (when a lot of memory is available) but doesn't work when other apps have recently been opened, you might just need to force-quit apps more often.

Another option for something going wrong is having malfunctioning packages from Cydia installed. Tweaks/extensions can have bugs that crash apps, and they can also contribute to low-memory problems. You can test this by rebooting your device with Mobile Substrate and all tweaks disabled (Mobile Substrate is the framework that tweaks use in order to modify apps and iOS) - in order to do that, boot your device while holding the volume-up button. Then try opening those apps and using your device normally. If the apps don't crash, that may indicate that a tweak had been causing the problem. You can reboot your device again (without holding the volume-up button) to re-enable Mobile Substrate, and then you can try uninstalling some tweaks from Cydia, testing the apps again, and seeing if you can isolate the cause that way.
posted by dreamyshade at 1:34 PM on April 11, 2013

You can also get a little more of a hint about what's happening on your device by looking at the crash reports for those apps. On your device, you can find the latest crash reports here: Settings -> General -> About -> scroll down to Diagnostics & Usage -> Diagnostic & Usage Data. If you've synced your device recently, you can find the reports on your computer - here's a guide to finding them (ignore the app-specific instructions). Crash reports should tell you whether these were low-memory crashes or not, although beyond that they're not very readable to people who didn't develop the app.
posted by dreamyshade at 1:49 PM on April 11, 2013