iMovie broken after iOS 9 upgrade

St0rMl0rD
Contributor III

I know this isn't a JAMF-related issue, but since this is the biggest community of Apple professionals, might as well give it a shot. So we just ran into an issue where iMovie stopped working these days. Here is the issue:

  • iPads are running iOS 8.4.1 and were running older version of iMovie (not iOS 9-supported one)
  • iMovie app updated to the version where it requires iOS 9 to run
  • If the user tries to launch the new iMovie app, it crashes and displays a very short message that iOS 9 is required to run this app
  • we cannot yet upgrade to iOS 9 for other reasons
  • iMovie doesn't work

Technically, the app shouldn't even be able to update if iOS 9 isn't present, however, in this case, iMovie did. Now we have hundreds of iPads where iMovie, one of the most used apps in school, doesn't even run.

I'll get Apple on the line to see how they explain this, but I'm just curious if anyone else experienced this as well.

6 REPLIES 6

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

You would think that the OS version requirements being what they are, would have prevented iOS devices running iOS 8 from installing the update, so indeed that is very bizarre. I would definitely discuss this with Apple. Someone messed something up. Its Apple's app after all, so its on them to explain how this could have happened.
I can almost guarantee that their boiler plater answer will be to upgrade your devices to iOS 9. Sometimes I feel Apple is so blinded by their own success and vision, that they just can't see the reality that not everyone in the world can just jump on their latest OS release day one.

cpdecker
Contributor III

We have experienced this as well. The version of iMovie (and also Google Sheets) that is currently on the App Store and available for users on 8.4.1 will not run if installed. I assumed more Apps would follow suit but we haven't seen any others yet.

I have 100% come to expect stuff like this from Apple. They consistently do not provide good support for enterprise environments that need to refrain from updating to the latest platforms for a few weeks or months.

Thankfully our App Store is turned off for students so we haven't had many people update the App...we just can't install it on newly deployed iPads.

St0rMl0rD
Contributor III

Google Sheets is working fine for us, waiting for the Apple Enterprise support rep to call me back on the iMovie issue.

St0rMl0rD
Contributor III

So basically Apple Enterprise Support has no idea what's happening, they handed the case over to engineering, who will contact me in a week or so.

St0rMl0rD
Contributor III

No reply from them about solving this issue, but since we upgraded to iOS 9, it's kind of solved itself now...Oh well.

cpdecker
Contributor III

Just digging this up since I try to be as honest as possible, even if it means eating my words on the regular.

Our problem ended up being an issue with our caching servers. We upgraded our firewall to a newer version of the same product some weeks before the caching server problem made itself known. It turns out that random Apps were being affected by the "Unable to Download App" error after each reset of the caching server cache. I believe the problem was that our Firewall was not allowing HTTP Partial Content requests, which also may be called HTTP Byte Ranges since a host makes a request for a range of bytes rather than an entire file. Through troubleshooting a different problem, I enabled that function and the caching servers began behaving at the same time.