{"id":19649,"date":"2017-11-27T14:46:08","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T19:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=19649"},"modified":"2017-11-27T14:55:32","modified_gmt":"2017-11-27T19:55:32","slug":"the-mystery-of-the-phantom-app-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/27\/the-mystery-of-the-phantom-app-updates\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mystery of the Phantom App Updates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/lapcatsoftware.com\/articles\/mystery-phantom-app-updates.html\">Jeff Johnson<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/lapcatsoftware.com\/articles\/mystery-phantom-app-updates.html\"><p>Starting on November 17, many iOS and tvOS apps that had not been updated for a year or two years suddenly received phantom updates in the App Store, without any action by the developers of those apps. The version numbers of the apps did not change. For some of the updates, the release notes were the same as the previous update. For others, the release notes said, &ldquo;This update is signed with Apple&rsquo;s latest signing certificate. No new features are included.&rdquo;<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>It&rsquo;s conceivable that recompiling the Bitcode would result in the same assembly size as before, but in my opinion that&rsquo;s unlikely. It&rsquo;s even more unlikely that this would result in some kind of significant runtime performance gain, which would be the only good reason I can think of for shipping a new Bitcode compile, absent a new processor architecture. Most likely, the matching <code>__text<\/code> sizes indicate that the same machine instructions as before were simply encrypted with a new key.<\/p><p>Mystery unsolved. Mission unaccomplished. I&rsquo;m still quite puzzled why Apple shipped all of these phantom app updates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Update (2017-11-27): <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/timohetzel\/status\/935234964794331137\">Timo Hetzel<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/timohetzel\/status\/935234964794331137\">\n<p>My tvOS app got the certificate update note, as it doesn&rsquo;t have a previous update and lacks any release notes. That&rsquo;s my guess.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Johnson: Starting on November 17, many iOS and tvOS apps that had not been updated for a year or two years suddenly received phantom updates in the App Store, without any action by the developers of those apps. The version numbers of the apps did not change. For some of the updates, the release [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[91,1246,466,31,1472,26],"class_list":["post-19649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-appstore","tag-bitcode","tag-codesigning","tag-ios","tag-ios-11","tag-iosapp"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19649"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19653,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19649\/revisions\/19653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}