My iPhone 4 died recently. Hard. Apple replaced it with a brand new one, which was very reasonable. I hadn’t backed up in a bit over a week. Such is life. (Hopefully the iCloud will float along soon, to save me from myself.)
The restore process always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because it never remembers where I put my apps. I have a lot of apps. They’re organized into a lot of folders. When the initial ‘restore’ process finishes, but it hasn’t done the first sync, I notice that any of Apple’s default apps (and some random others) that I’d stored in folders, will preserve those folder names. They’re in little, impossible ‘folders of one’. At least they save me from having to retype their names.
Then the sync happens, and it loads everything else back on: apps, music, etc. And all of the apps are all over the place. (Oddly, after those single-app folders, it’s all the apps starting with ‘M’ and onward. )
I try and remember exactly how I had everything, and then I laboriously futz with the UI until I drag everything back into place. If I’m on iTunes, the process is slightly easier, but still fairly tedious. I feel like there must be a better, easier way to do this, but more importantly, I don’t feel like it should ever happen. If I put it in a folder, doesn’t that get backed up in some pref somewhere that ought to persist, even across restores? Is my iTunes library or my iPhone’s backup somehow corrupt? (It happens with the iPad too, like when I switched to the iPad 2.) So I suspect it’s a bug, or at least not as well written or intuitive as it could be.
I have enough apps that they don’t all show up when they’re not all in folders. I got started on the re-filing process tonight and got a good chunk done. But after I’ve put a bunch of them into folders, and even reduced the number of pages worth of apps, I’m never quite sure what magic has to happen before more of them will re-appear. I know they’re already on there; I can left-swipe from my home screen and search for them. But I can’t find them if I go looking. (Is it my next sync? Power off and on? I have no idea.)
An earnest wish: if I see an app in my search results, I’d sure love to be able to press and hold and get some kind of contextual menu that said, “Locate this app” to whisk me to its page. Because then I could put it back where it belonged – without having to keep searching for it, or without having to connect to my MacBook Pro and find it, possibly in ‘The Grey Realms’, which is the name I’ve just coined for those screens which are Beyond Page Eleven. (I have eight full pages of those, plus a few random stragglers.)
Any other kind of search result, you tap on it and there’s some default action: play that song, open that contact, etc. Launch that app. No, no, no, just show me where it is, dangit.
And then the crowning moment: I sync again, and it erases all of my hard work, like I never did anything in the first place. Everything is out of a folder again, thoughtfully alphabetized for me.
A small puff of steam comes out of both of my ears, cartoon-style. So I sit down and I write this, hoping that somewhere, someone who can solve this problem will read these words, and go snooping, and file bugs in radar and make life a little better for everyone who has experienced these symptoms.
And then I go sort my apps. Again.
