Phantom App Updates in the iOS App Store

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 notes were the same as the previous update. For others, the release notes said, “This update is signed with Apple’s latest signing certificate. No new features are included.” Some people speculated that Bitcode recompilation was performed on the apps. So far, Apple has not published any press release or documentation explaining why it updated all of these apps.

Vesper is one of the apps affected by this. If you’re seeing a Vesper update, it’s not because it’s actually updated. Sorry for any confusion, but we had nothing to do with this.

★ Friday, 1 December 2017