GSRegisterPurpleNamedPort SIGABRT in UIApplicationMain Before App Delegate Gets to Run Any Code

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We recently put an update out for one of our apps and many users told us that they could no longer run the app because it crashed on startup.

We have been able to recreate the crash by building and running the previous release build onto a device and then building and running the new build overtop of it on the same device, but the stack trace for this crash is very strange:

Thread 0 Crashed:
0   libSystem.B.dylib             0x000791d0 __kill + 8
1   libSystem.B.dylib             0x000791c0 kill + 4
2   libSystem.B.dylib             0x000791b2 raise + 10
3   libSystem.B.dylib             0x0008d6fa abort + 50
4   GraphicsServices              0x00003aa8 GSRegisterPurpleNamedPort + 172
5   GraphicsServices              0x00003d5a GSEventInitialize + 150
6   UIKit                         0x00004cd6 UIApplicationMain + 350
7   MyApp                         0x0000df5c main (main.m:14)
8   MyApp                         0x00002c84 start + 32

It appears to be crashing in the UIApplicationMain method that main calls. But it crashes before it reaches any of the methods in our app delegate. I have put breakpoints in all of the app delegate methods and none of them are reached.

In addition, this appears to be only occurring for users that are updating the app. Users that are downloading it from the app store without it already being on their iPhones are not seeing the problem.

Has anyone ever encountered a crash like this? Why would this problem only occur for updates?

iphone
ios4
asked on Stack Overflow Aug 28, 2010 by derekvanvliet

8 Answers

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Is this under iOS 4.0? This type of error had been reported to occur when a process or thread from the previous install of this app has crashed and somehow hasn't been cleaned up by the OS yet or has hung up in the debugger.

Does a reboot of the iPhone after installation of the new version of the app cause this error to go away? That would be one good indication that something is stuck/corrupted in the OS from the previous install, rather than in the app bundle itself.

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 28, 2010 by hotpaw2
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I've been having the same issue (thankfully I caught it before submitting to the AppStore). Unlike this answer states, the issue still occurs on iOS 5.x and 6.x.

So I went into the Console and found a few messages were logged before my app crashed. First was this message:

com.apple.launchd.peruser.503[148]: (UIKitApplication:BUNDLE-ID[0x4fb5][20462]) The following job tried to hijack the service "BUNDLE-ID-1" from this job: UIKitApplication:BUNDLE-ID-1[0xac31]

The next message in the console displays immediately afterwards:

GSRegisterPurpleNamedPort Couldn't register BUNDLE ID with the bootstrap server. Error: unknown error code (1100). This generally means that another instance of this process was already running or is hung in the debugger.

The crash is caused by another almost identical process already running on the system. It sounds like an issue with iOS not the app itself. This should help clear things up. Best thing to do would probably be to tell users to quit the app, try restarting and open again.

I've also submitted a bug report to Apple detailing the issue.

EDIT: It looks as though this might have been an issue with Xcode itself. Apple has just released an update which should fix the issue (at least in the Simulator):

Mac AppStore Xcode Update

answered on Stack Overflow Jun 9, 2013 by Sam Spencer • edited May 23, 2017 by Community
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I got this problem in a project every time i debugged it a second time. Only rebooting the device would allow me to debug once again.

This particular cause of the above stacktrace was finally solved by reinstalling iTunes.

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 30, 2011 by Orpe
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It might be purely co incidence but when ever i debug the application release mode and than without deleting it again tries to debug it in debug mode this problem seems to happen. restarting it however does the trick .

answered on Stack Overflow Sep 9, 2011 by Mihir Mehta
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It seems that old app has been launched without quit completely, some handlers is still alive or registered by OS, so when you launch the new version, app crash.

I have also experienced such tough issue, how do you fix it finally? Thanks.

answered on Stack Overflow Feb 27, 2012 by jianhua
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No core data here. Just updated a text file in the main bundle, and all of a sudden this "purple point" fail. IOS 5.1.1, iPad, opengl app with a lot of gestural interfacing. I was real glad to find some clues here. The reset fixed it.

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 9, 2012 by Dan L
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It seems that happend also to me when update to 10.8.4, I guess it is an Xcode bug, I will issue a bug report. If the app is opened and I run it from Xcode, the app crashes, soetimes it restarts by itself and sometimes I need to relaunch it again.

answered on Stack Overflow Jun 7, 2013 by Andrea
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If you use Core Data in your app and changed the schema, then you will often see this issue arise. What happens is the old version of the app will have an old version of the database (sqlite presumably) and when the new version of the app starts up, it expects the new version of the database as well. This causes a crash right at startup like this.

The immediate fix for this is to delete the app and re-install it. We do this while in development. But when you are ready to push the new version, you'll need to setup a Mapping Model in order to migrate your database. There is a lot of info on data migration in the developer docs:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/cocoa/conceptual/CoreDataVersioning/Introduction/Introduction.html

answered on Stack Overflow Jun 1, 2011 by Sebastien Martin

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