Unable to purchase.

I found AN answer that worked for my GF's phone exhibiting this problem. Turns out she had been attempting to redeem a starbucks promo app code without network connectivity, so it had failed, and she forgot about it. When I went into the itunes store app on the phone, there it was waiting to redeem. Clicked "redeem" and it went through, and then her home screen on the phone popped up with all of the icons of the other apps she had been trying to download, and they all downloaded. So check the itunes store to see if something is stuck there!

I have been having the same issue. I have reposted a reply from Mac OS XP from early 2012 of this thread. This worked for me and I found that the purchases were definitely being made (even if it was free). They simply would not download. After completing these steps. All the apps I had tried download started all at once.

User ryanpetris just posted this to another thread. You may want to try it out and see if anyone still has the problem afterwards or if it's solved:

I has this happen to me last night to. Ultimately, this worked:

1. Open the App Store

2. Goto the Features page.

3. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and press on the button with your Apple ID.

4. Press logout.

5. Reboot yor device (!! VERY IMPORTANT. This didn't work until I did this part).

6. Once rebooted, sign back in to your account.

I had the same issue and thankfully I was able to solve it today. I chatted to a very helpful tech and he instructed me to sign out and back into the app store. While I was doing that, I noticed that the slider for apps under the Automatic Downloads section was set to off, I set it to on and that along with signing out and back of the app store made the issue go away, it automatically started downloading all the apps I had previosly attempted to download. I hope this helps!!

You, sir, saved my life. Even after three times restore I was unable to download apps/updates.

the only affect resetting all settings has is removing a passcode if youve made one for your device and resets your wallpaper. If changing your wall paper is an incovience and you do not want to listen to the technical support advisors from apple than you probably should not own a device.

I've had this issue too. When I plugged my phone into my computer to sync the other day, the apps downloaded. I then noticed that itunes said I only had one device (my ipad) set up to download to. I'm wondering if that's why I can't download to my phone unless I do it from my PC. However I didn't find any place where I could add my phone as a device to download to. Now I go back in again and I can't find my way back to where I was. Strange thing is that I can update apps on my phone all day long. Has anyone else discovered the device issue?

I'd like to give a warning to be very careful deleting anything inside the Downloads folder. Maybe it used to work, but now on iOS 8.1 this has caused serious problems.

After a device reboot, the downloads.28.sqlite file DOES NOT get re-created.

This has caused a situation where no App Store or iTunes Store downloads will work at all, and app updates are no longer detected in the App Store app.

In an attempt to mend this situation, I connected a 2nd iOS device that was working fine and I had not done any surgery on, and copied the contents of its Downloads folder to my computer (including downloads.28.sqlitedb), then copied those contents into a faulty iPhone and did a reboot. This restored the ability to download Apps but app updates are not being detected at all and the list of updates in App Store app's Updates tab is empty even though I know there are newer versions of some installed apps.

"unable to purchase" l have this error

and i cant set apple id in ituns and app store