For those of you who are in the iPhone developer community or just are just geeky enough to pay for the developer program in order to get a sneak peek on your friends, I thought I would let you in on some information I received from Pandora concerning problems with the Pandora Radio application and the 3.1 beta.
I noticed that after updating to 3.1 Beta I was no longer able to access my Pandora Radio application. The application would run, but eventually I would get an error screen that told me it couldn’t connect.
After trying various troubleshooting techniques on my own I e-mail Pandora support. Mike at Pandora gave me an extended set of instructions to follow:
In particularly stubborn cases, in addition to deleting Pandora from your iPhone, you may also have to:
- delete Pandora from the iTunes list of Applications on your computer (it’s an option in iTunes from the list on the left, below Music)
- sign out of the iTunes Store (click your iTunes Store sign-in information, usually an email address, in the upper right of the screen and select ‘sign out’)
- re-sync your iPhone within iTunes
- then sign back in to the iTunes Store (again, in the upper right)
- re-sync your iPhone one last time
Then re-install Pandora, either via the App Store on your iPhone, or via iTunes on your computer.
After trying all of that, the application would still not talk to Pandora’s system. I then tried the drastic step of doing a factory restore on the iPhone using the 3.1 Beta download as the firmware. This still didn’t help much.
After reporting all of this back to Mike at Pandora, I received the following reply via e-mail:
Hi Andy,
Sorry about that. We’re aware of this issue with the app not working with the 3.1 OS and we’re hoping this is solved in our next release. Thanks so much for your patience in the meantime!
Best,
Mike @ Pandora
While this was not unexpected, given that I am running a non-production release of the OS, I was quite gratified to find out that they were aware of the issue and working on it. There have been other times where support personnel have told users “Sorry, we can’t help you because you are running our software in a non-standard environment.” Kudos to Pandora for not reacting that way and for giving a meaningful response.
Update (2009-07-14 11:52PM EDT):
After updating to Beta 2 of OS 3.1 tonight Pandora Radio is now working again.