It was a day like any other, my routine always the same: Roll out of bed an hour later than I should, then walk over to my iPhone and haphazardly bat at it to try and stop the alarm from screeching for the fifth time that morning. Walk to the bathroom, then pop open the Mail app while I brush my – Wait, what the heck?
Everything on my homescreen was wrong. Mint was now Yammer. AT&T Nav was a creepy blank space. Icons were doubling, overlapping, and just being generally wrong. It looked like my icons had decided to spend the night boozing and fornicating, with everyone falling asleep in the wrong bed.
Googling wasn’t turning up much, so I assumed it was an isolated event. I took a few stabs in the dark at fixing it before finally giving in and just dumping everything and restoring from a backup.
Turns out, this is more far more common than I had imagined. It’s happened to me again once since then. At a recent iPhone developer meetup I attended, at least a handful of people mentioned the same thing had happened to them. All of them were running iPhone 3.0, and it happened to both Windows and OS X users.
With that, I ask: has this happened to you? How did you go about fixing it? I tried everything from deleting and resyncing the applications to yelling at the handset in a very stern manner, and the only thing that seemed to work was wiping everything and starting over. This can be done through iTunes, or on the device itself at Settings > Reset > Reset all settings. Either way, make sure you backup first; both methods dump all your data, but restoring from a backup doesn’t seem to bring the issue back.
“Everything on my homescreen was wrong. Mint was now Yammer. AT&T Nav was a creepy blank space. Icons were doubling, overlapping, and just being generally wrong. It looked like my icons had decided to spend the night boozing and fornicating, with everyone falling asleep in the wrong bed.”
Hands down the line of the month.
Yup, I don’t really care what else was said (though I read it in full), but that line itself was the best thing that has happened to me all day. Kudos to you Greg for the laugh of the day!
It happened to me before a couple times. I didn’t know how to fix it, so I ended up ignoring it. I think a software update was what finally set it all straight again…
This happened to me the first time I had to restart my iphone because of a locked up application. Upon restart a couple of the icons were blank grey boxes….. days later I noticed some icons were the wrong icon.
Deleting the app from itunes and re-downloading it and re-syncing works if it is just one or two apps
This happend to me but mine is jailbroke on 3.0.1 so i just assumed thats why it was doing this. I ended up deleting the icons but didnt reinstall them (it did it to some apps i never use) and it seems to be fine. My friend had the same thing happen. His cydia was the World of Warcraft app icon and he said after a few days it just turned back to the Cydia logo. Its weird cause he doesnt even have the WOW app, he just looked at it to get familiar with the app store.
so I just thought this was a jailbreak problem, I guess not?
Yes. This happens all the time when I reset my 3GS. I usually just unistall and re-install apps, but this drives me NUTS!
Hell yeah, I was wondering when someone was going to write about this. I have had this happen to me at least a dozen times. Every time it happens I have to retore. I have yet to experience it since the last update; however, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened again. It usually occurs after installing a new application. ?????????????????????
you can also uninstall and reinstall and that will work too.
The last update didn’t quite fix it. It’s still happening. I also get half icons that are half one thing and half another.
The uninstall/restall does work, but it kills the saved game info on some games which sucks.
Hahaha, great laugh! You’d think that a phone that costs you as much as a wholesale notebook would be free of such ridiculous issues right?
Wow, good stuff Apple.
it’ll be fixed in the next service patch lol
2ndly, its not necessarily apples fault. it’d be interesting to find out if anyone had installed a similar app or something else.
i haven’t seen this on the ipod touch 3.0 at all.
Havnt seen it in any of the iPod touches just a couple of iPhones. Good to know my baby (iPod) will be safe.
@Alex, don’t be too happy, I had just encountered this problem on my iPod touch yesterday.
Strange that I had synced both my iPhone & iPod touch with the same iMac, same iTunes account about the same time but my iPhone was ok so far (touch wood).
Yeah that happened to me once. It was a pain.
I had the same problem. I ended up deleting the apps & then redownloading them. Then it was alright. This always happens to me when I reboot the phone & that is why I have not done it in a long time.
Same problem for me. I made it disappear by downloading a new app (really) and after another restart of my iPhone. :)
Take one of the Apps that has icon issues… delete it… go into the app store… re-download it… tap it once it stats downloading to pause it… hold down the power button… slide to power down… while your phone is powering down, hold down the power button until the phone is completely off… then turn your phone back on… then tap the app you re-downloaded to resume the download… and all of your icons should be fixed!
I have had this happen a few times as well. You don’t have to reinstall from a backup. You can just open iTunes on your computer, plug in your phone, go to the applications section and uncheck all your apps and sync with none. Then recheck them and sync again. That way you don’t have to install from a backup and lose things like pics or texts if you haven’t backed up recently.
Goggling didn’t turn much up? Really? What obscure phrase did you search for?
I must have been crazy googling “wrong icons iphone” because the top result I got was this link: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2044341&tstart=0 which shows that it’s been happening quite a bit and how to resolve it.
Better “update” your google man.
Heh – the first time this happened to me was almost immediately after the 3.0 update. Googling it now brings up a ton of results. At the time, there wasn’t nearly as much.
Yesterday afternoon I wanted to take some photos of interesting road signs but couldn’t find my camera icon & wondered what I had done wrong. Today, just before heading for the Apple store I read this post and it was a 25 second fix. Thanks.
Happens to me all the time. No real idea how to fix it. Usually just delete the app and redownload from
app store. That sometimes works.
Even on 3.0.1 I’m still having the wierd icon issues. I thought it was just me. Glad to hear it’s an apple thing and not I’m a stupid idiot who can’t work his iPhone correctly thing. Lol.
This is the quality with which they release their OS. And they reject apps with meaingless reasons like “it will confuse the user”!!
This happened to me twice already and each time I did the following:
- delete the erroneous apps from within the iPhone
- plug iPhone to iTunes
- re-sync
et voila…
That’s never happened to me, but once all of my icons stacked on top of each other, like I had dragged all of the icons together and for some reason it stuck. An angry reboot later and they were back to normal. I get the top bar being the wrong color pretty often, like black/clear when its supposed to be white and the reverse aswell.
or just try the shaky-shaky thing. Maybe blowing some fog into it, lighting a zippo or something.
I think the icons were complaining that thei are all designed with the same silly shine and rounded corners effects. That must be it.
I have had this happen a couple of times and no solution I tried lasted for long. Then, once, by sheer coincidence, I allowed my battery to run down the whole way (which you’re supposed to do once per month to recalibrate the battery) and when I plugged my phone in, all my icons were corrected. After that I could not reproduce the error at all. A few weeks later, I downloaded another app and had it’s icon get screwed up. As a test, I let my battery run down completely. When I plugged it in, the icon was fixed. Not sure why this would work, but so far it has worked for me and since the second time, I haven’t had a screwy icon since.
this happened to me too… i reinstalled os 3.0 and everything was ok again.. after that jump from os 9 to os x apple is making so many more problems … its liek with windows now, but with a nice design.. great, but the frozen screens is why we came to you apple! should we leave you now?!
I just restored my entire iPod, and that worked.
I have this problem all the time, which started occurring after the 3.0 update.
None of the workarounds I found worked until after 3.1. Now, all I need to do is power off my phone and restart it. Icons now reappear and rearrange themselves back to normal.