Q: iPad 3 - "Cannot Connect to iTunes Store" - Updates only

I wish I knew why these issues occur with the iDevices. Many people would like to know what causes the problem while most don't care what causes the problem, rather they just want the problem fixed for their iDevice. For these people these forums are a great source of information to find a "fix". Apple's next big software release, IOS 6, for all our iDevices, is just a few weeks away. It will probably fix the "can not connect to iTunes store" problem but will probably cause a handful of new iDevice issues. Apple's over-the-phone support system is just as bad as Microsofts has been. I'm sure Apple is aware of many of these issues that arise but you usually have to wait for months for a big iOS software update to fix it. I think these forums and communities are great though to find solutions, if even for a portion of people with the issue.

Ok, I honestly have tried EVERY SINGLE suggestion in EVERY online forum including changing the date 1 & 2 years ahead, resetting all settings, resetting network settings, etc.

FINALLY after 1 month of this update issue, I found something that FINALLY worked for me.  Please try this even though it may seem similar to other things you've tried and let me know if it works for you too:

1. Go to Settings > General > Date & Time

2. Turn off "Set Automatically" if it is on

3. Change your time zone to a city/country COMPLETELY different than your own (I chose Bangkok, Thailand)

4. Click on "Set Date & Time"

5. Click on today's date and change it to the LAST year that's not greyed out (for me it was 2038 - which also automatically changed the day to January 1st) - You may have pop ups for calendar reminders, etc. Just close all of them which might take a while

6. Go to the App Store and click on "Updates"

7. You should NOW get a message saying "Cannot connect to the Store - A secure connection could not be established.  Please check your Date & Time settings"

8. Go back to Settings > General > Date & Time and turn "Set Automatically" to "On"

9. Go back to the App Store and you should be able to access the "Updates" page again!!!

thanks,

it's work for my.

None of these is working

Oups!!!!

** Ipad

I promised a reply after my visit to the Apple store.

The first support person said "we just have to reset your whole device."

The second support person worked with me for much longer. Ultimately he didn't know the answer. Further he didn't bother accessing any resources other than his training. So he wasn't up on any recent developments.

He directed me to the online Apple support on this issue. I'm afraid I submitted my request to the wrong department. The answer I got (after 12 hours or so) directed me to other places to get help. I'll be sending a support request now.

<edit>

The department I did reached helped with application downloads from a billing perspective. The person who handled the case did indeed research the answer anyway. He pointed me to various resources as well as discussion board links he found.

Here's my update.

I resubmitted my support request and ensured I sent it to support for "Troubleshooting iTunes Store error codes".

Not only did I restate my technical question I also asked:

"Is it the case there is no support for this Apple side failure without paying given that I'm out of warranty? The problem is not in the phone since it affected 3 of our phones over the course of 2 weeks. Even if you cannot answer the technical question please answer that one."

I did receive an automated reply giving me a case number. I submitted the request on 9/3. I've not heard back.

I have received support under Apple Care in the past. They are often unable to help. They seem to rely on an internal knowledge base and the same resources we have access to on the web. I don' want to pay for that kind of support at this point. However, they do have the ability to escalate a problem to an engineer. However I suspect their starting approach will be to restore the phone. I don't need to pay to go down that avenue.

So far, I'm only slightly upset. I would be very upset if I didn't have an Apple store near me.

Even though we seem to feel it's a common problem since we see a lot of discussion on the web, the people who have no problem with this don't bother with discussions. So I have no sense of how prevalent this is. Also I haven't really tried the "ultimate" solution which is to restore the phone. It's good that they provide that option. I've made many calls to Dell regarding screwed up computers. Their typical solution is to reinstall the operating system. On windows that can be a whole day affair since I have tons of software installed. The iPhone reinstall will be far quicker.

If I hear nothing back in a few days I'll be taking that approach. I'll report back in either case.

This worked a gem thanks so much I had tried everything!!

The same support person got back to me. He apologized not having gotten back to me sooner. Also he seemed to suggest there might be complementary support if I called Apple Care. It seems clear that the express lane does not really offer technical support for the iPhone.

Here's the bad news. Seaottr's suggestion worked for me. Thanks so much Seaottr. I'm now going to have a hard time continuing an investigation which might help others.

Since I arrogantly said we'd like to understand why rather than just get a solution, I feel I now owe a guess at why the fix worked. Please ignore the following if you don't care :-) Also, I'm probably wrong.

Since I had three phones with the problem I had a bit of an opportunity to try some variations of Seaottr's solution. First time I followed Seaottr's suggestions to the letter. It worked. The second time I didn't bother with the time zone. It worked. The third time all I did was set the year to 2020. It worked.

In the past when I'd followed the advice of date changes I'd never been instructed to go more than a couple of years into the future - so I never did.

It seems like my problem was an SSL one (or something like SSL). Changing the time way into the future invalidates Apple's server certificate. That certificate is used to prove to the phone that it is connecting to the real Apple store. Any certificate like that has an expiration date. It's up to a device to download a new one when the old one expires. Or it's up to Apple to provide a new one; perhaps with a OS update.

So setting my time way into the future made the phone think the certificate had expired. It probably then deleted the expired certificate. Then I set the time back to now. The next time an attempt was made to access the store the current certificate was redownloaded. Perhaps that certificate has an expiration date 3 years in the future so in the past just setting my date forward by a couple of years didn't trigger the expiration and discarding of the certificate.

But how did the old certificate that had to be dumped get bad? Since it happened to 3 of my phones there had to be some relationship between those phones. Since my three phones use the same AppleId I'd have to guess that was it. There's really nothing else in common. There might be some coupling of the AppleId together with the certificate which has to be in a valid state. So if something was wrong with my AppleId then it could have caused a problem on all my phones. It's kind of typical to do things like "signing" an AppleId with a certificate. That's the kind of coupling to which I'm referring.

So what makes me think I had a bad AppleId? Well, I hadn't used an email address for my very old Apple Id. Futher the password I had used was invalid by Apple's standard.

Apple's password standards must have changed recently. The old password I had wasn't more than 6 months old. On a lark I went to http://appleid.apple.com to change my id to an email address. However the existing password I had would not be accepted; it was not sufficiently complex. So I made it more complex. (Interesting that I had read posts elsewhere that changing the password on an AppleId has fixed our problem for some.)

So perhaps, Apple was rolling out a new certificate over a period of a week to all their devices. As the new certificate got to each of my phones the bad AppleId triggered a problem. Or they were rolling out some code relating to the tightened password requirements on AppleIds which triggered the problem (that seems more likely).

So, fixing my AppleId and THEN forcing a redownload of the Apple server certificate solved the problem.

I have a 25% confidence level that 80% of this is correct.

So I assume you set your date way into the future AFTER you did some tweak to your AppleId and it didn't work.

I absolutely did exit the App Store application at the beginning.

1 - Play with my AppleId in some way at http://appleid.apple.com. For me it was changing the Id and password. I did NOT make these changes on the phone itself. I wanted to force the phone to somehow grab the new AppleId from the internet.

2 - Exit the App Store application. I felt this was important. On startup of the application I wanted it to fail. If the application was already running then I wasn't certain it would fail since it maybe didn't need to reauthenticate with the server after the date change.

3 - Go to the date and time settings page. Turn of the automatic time update and set the date's year to 2020. I had to be far enough in the future to invalidate the Apple server certificate with respect to its expiration date.

4 - Start up the App Store application. It complains that it cannot establish a secure connection. There is no way it could establish that connection at that point. There is NO Apple certificate available on the device or at the server which has not expired by that date.

5 - Exit the App Store application. I want it to try to authenticate again when I start it up after I fixed the date.

6 - In the date preferences reenable the automatic time setting. I noticed the date fixed itself immediately.

7 - Start up the App Store application. I believe by that point the device had discarded the old Apple certificate that had signed my bad AppleId. The phone downloaded the existing Apple certificate again and signed my good Apple Id and all was good.

At that point I was able to see those applications which required updating. I did not get any error from the App Store application.

I am NOT resetting the device during this. Although just prior to trying this solution (about a day or two before), I did reset the phone by selecting "Reset All Settings". That did nothing to solve the problem. After that reset I had tried no other solution prior to trying the one above.

I'm going to continue to puzzle over this and will report anything else I think is relevant.

Worked for my iPod iTouch 4th!  Thank you!