Weird iPhone App icon swapping

September 4, 2009

If you have an iPhone you probably have a ton of Apps. About a week ago I started to notice that some of my Apps had the ‘wrong’ icon…..NPR news now had the Labyrinth icon, FAST had the Google icon and, worst of all, Facebook had the LinkedIn icon and vice-versa!

After much searching I found that; (a) this is a known bug, and, (b) it is easily fixed as follows;

1. On your iPhone open the App Store
2. Download any App (I used a free one)
3. Once the download starts, pause it by tapping on the icon
4. Completely shut down the iPhone by holding down the Home and on/off buttons simultaneously – you will see the Power Down slider – ignore this and keep holding the two buttons until the screen goes black
5. Wait a minute and then restart the iPhone by pressing the on/off button for 2-3 seconds (the restart takes around a minute)
6. Problem should now be fixed (you can resume downloading the app in step 2 by pressing its icon)

Worked for me.

(Update: bug is fixed with iPhone OS 3.1 release)