Syncing Apps to iPhone 6 / 6 Plus Stuck

I had very similar problems when restoring a mini iPad from a backup on an iMac (following a factory reset of the iPad to clear the dreaded 'other'). The iPad is running iOS 8 and the Mac OSX 10.9.5 & iTunes 11.4. To being with it would sync only a few apps before hanging with a Console message saying iTunes: Operation timed out. It seemed to be hanging after one app was installed and before another started. The banner message in iTunes would suggest the app sync was in progress, but I noticed that the app it named was in fact there and working on the iPad - it just wouldn't move on to sync the next app.

Unplugging the iPad and plugging it back in would start syncing again. Two or three more apps would sync and again it would get stuck between app syncs. I eventually got to the end of my 40+ apps and it started on 1700 photos, with similar symptoms! At that point I tried turning off WiFi and Bluetooth on the iPad, and from then on it sync'd all the photos and 800 music tracks without another hitch.

I have subsequently sync'd another 150 photos with WiFi and bluetooth switched on again, so I can't be sure that this was/is the entire problem, but it did seem to do the trick.

I just was able to sync my 327 apps after having it hang during the iPhone Sync process about 7 times. I tried the disable WiFI Sync, unplugging tech, etc. What worked for me was a restore from backup, plug cable, enable Sync with this iPhone over WiFi on iTunes and the iPhone 6. The the key I believe is to make sure not transfer any iPhotos to the iPhone. The synch completed from 1 to 327 in about 40 minutes. I added the iPhoto collection later.

Great, just came back from the store with my new Iphone 6, tried to sync all my Iphone 5 content and have the same issue as everyone else.

Everything syncs fine, photos, contacts messages, except all my Apps...what a joke, this phone has been out for a month now and there is no fix for this obviously quite serious issue ?

I received a new iPhone 6 Plus yesterday and experienced the same issue, having never experienced so frustrating a situation with Apple products before (though I have had several that came close over the years).

My suspicion was that the Restore/Sync process was held up by some older apps that were incompatible somehow with the syncing process, causing it to hang. Although I first updated all of my apps on my iPhone 5 prior to syncing it to iTunes on my Mac Pro, I noted that several older apps that were on the phone were actually "orphaned", and were no longer available (or updated). Therefore, any of these older apps could have been a culprit.

To test this theory, I decided to take this opportunity to clean house on my iPhone 5 and delete any and all apps that I don't really use anymore, leaving me with only about 80 apps, all of which were fairly recently updated by the developers (or Apple branded apps) - previously, I had about 215 apps on the phone that had accumulated since the 1st generation iPhone.

Once I did this, I resynced the iPhone 5 and then disabled the syncing of music and photos and synced one more time. I then saved a copy of the resulting archive (iTunes Preferences -> Devices -> right click on the desired archive (called iPhone 5 in this case) and select Archive.

Once this was done, I then restored my iPhone 6 Plus from this archive and let it sync. In about 30 minutes, I was good to go. I then added back the music and finally the photos. Now, everything is working as it should.

If I didn't have my iPhone 5 available to perform these steps, I would have manually downloaded the missing apps on the iPhone 6 Plus via the iTunes Store app. Any old apps that were no longer available could be deleted from the iPhone, but they should also be deleted from iTunes -> Apps on the computer so they won't attempt to repopulate the iPhone.

Ideally, Apple should have some check during the sync process to ensure that all third-party apps meet some defined criteria to ensure they will work on iOS 8 and will properly sync.

Shame on Apple for not doing this!!

Hope this helps someone.

I finally got around it by downloading all purchased apps form my Iphone to my Itunes library.

Resetting my unsuccessfully synced Iphone 6 to factory defaults.

Restarted my computer.

Set up the Iphone 6 with the latest backup from the Iphone 5 and it finally synched all the apps, it took a while and it was stuck at 22% for some time but by just letting it sit there it eventually synched all the apps.

what a pain.

My backup was stored on my pc ; not in Icloud so the Wi-Fi method referred to by others does not work.

The problem is transferring apps on the iPhone 6 plus - mine is a 128gb - not sure if it applies to other models as well

Apps can be happily transferred from the iPhone to iTunes, but not from iTunes to iPhone.

The solution

- restore your phone normally

- then download the apps you want direct onto your device again from the app store - (all previous purchases are grouped, and are found on the iPhone in app store > updates > purchased. Once you have downloaded them all to your phone, then it will sync.

It is important to ensure that no apps are marked as "will transfer" before the sync starts the problem also applies to updates, and new apps purchased - in all cases download to the iPhone first and then sync back to PC.

It may be of interest (not of much use, though) in relation to this discussion in general, but I've done pretty well everything a lot of these posts have suggested, and any attempt to sync just takes a long time - not hours, but many minutes.

I notice that the activity bar data (1 of 7, 2 of 7 .....6 of 7)moves along fairly quickly until it gets to 7 of 7, and after a few minutes of "syncing" (apparently doing nothing) the blue activity bar (top centre of the screen) said it was copying a number of files. It occured to me that it looks like it's recopying some of my files or apps again (rather than just updating with anything that has been added or changed). The "copying X of X files" moves a bit too quickly, but the data look like song titles, rather than app names, which tend to be shortish.

I thought it might be an idea to uncheck the Sync Music button, but when I did this it asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this as it would remove all my music from my iPhone 6 Plus. This isn't really a solution, so I didn't try it.

I've only got 9 apps installed (yeah, not a big fan) and have unchecked "Automatically install new apps". That said, I've got the TomTom app for Western Europe which was quite large (1.89GB); if that is being recopied, as opposed to being updated, this might be a reason for this glitch. Having said that, the names which whizz through at the 7 of 7 copying phase don't look anything like place names, but, as I mentioned above, appear to be much more like titles of songs or something or other.

I've only ever had one book in iBooks, but that seems to have disappeared.

In sum, I can't fathom out why sync is taking so long. Is it Yosemite? Is it a glitch in iTunes? Is it a problem with the iPhone 6? Is it a combination of some or all of these. Bottom line is, syncing is taking a long time, and the problem, even following the sage advice offered by others, doesn't seem to want to go away.

I'm guessing there's going to be little or no point asking Apple, but my iPhone only arrived yesterday, and I only installed Yosemite last Friday so it might also be a solution to uninstall Yosemite and see whether I have this problem with Mavericks. For obvious reasons I really don't want to do that.

This is purely speculative but I'm throwing it out there.

I've actually had two problems, the app syncing problem and a music syncing problem. Even after getting the apps on the phone, my music wouldn't sync fully. Weird things would happen; entire playlists wouldn't sync at all; music supposedly synced would be grayed out; if I tried to delete all the music on the phone and start over, some of it would get dumped into the "other" category where I couldn't get rid of it short of restoring the phone; and on and on. There are threads on music syncing problems as well; in particular, Music Won't Sync From Itunes Correctly.

From page 9 of the latter thread, musicmanasp recommends searching for and deleting exact duplicates (on a Mac keyboard, option select View -> Show Exact Duplicates). I simply deleted mine via command delete and then emptied the trash; I had about 250 duplicates out of about 9500 tracks.

The bottom line is that, for me, this seems to have fixed BOTH the app syncing problem and the music syncing problem. I say seems because by this point I've lost the patience to be systematic. But I now have all the apps I want on the phone and also far more music than I've had before; so, so far so good.

As to why the duplicate problem seems suddenly to be an issue, I have no idea. Maybe it was always an issue and for some reason I didn't notice. I do think that the duplicate issue is mixed up with iTunes Match, which I will now keep turned off on the computer I use for syncing to my iPhone.

1) Plugged in phone immediately with factory-fresh settings.

2) Restore from backup (in iTunes)

3) iTunes does the initial restore phase, then the phone reboots.

4) This is usually the part where syncing apps hangs. I STOPPED the phone from syncing and did the "Transfer Purchases ...". Then the phone started syncing apps just fine. (Weird, because this is my iPhone6! Any purchases on there *came from the backup*.)

After waiting SO LONG to get the phone, and finally receiving it Wednesday evening, and after putting up with the frustrations of trying to restore my previous backup, this seems to have done the trick for me as well. iTunes is FINALLY in the process now of copying all my music tracks without the endless loop of getting stuck on either step 4, 5, or 6.

For so very long, the tagline with Apple products and software was "it just works". Well, it doesn't "just work" anymore. Still, that being said, after trying to download, install and setup iTunes on my daughter's Acer Laptop, I can't ever see myself going back to trying to use Windows software. Ever again. And I'm going to get my daughter a Macbook Air post haste!

As I already have an iPhone 5S I was using the cable from the 5S with the iPhone 6 Plus (which is working fine with the 5S).

However, I have been having loads of issues and sent quite a few messages to the www.apple.com/feedback site.

However, after seeing the response from :

JLoScottSep 19, 2014 9:50 PM
Re: Syncing Apps to iPhone 6 / 6 Plus Stuckin response to chillybear

I also tried the cable that came with my 6+ and now its working fine. So weird, something must have changed in the cable!

I tried the new cable and voila; it suddenly syncs perfectly and super fast!

I Finally received my iPhone 6 plus this past Monday, and have been trying to sort this problem out since then. It's not my first rodeo with an iPhone. Every time I have upgraded, I transferred purchases than backed up my old phone. I then plug the new phone into my PC and restore the backup. Never had a problem before now.

The backup appears to put everything onto the 6 plus, the app icons are there, but dark with either their name or 'waiting...' underneath them. All my settings are correct. Even saved games and files for the apps I HAVE managed to put back are there! But the apps WILL NOT restore via iTunes. I've tried all the suggestions I've seen here without success. I spent an hour or so screen sharing with Apple tech support on Wednesday afternoon, so that they could actually see what was happening, and still no solution could be found. They just told me to try a procedure that I already had tried, and if that didn't work, to ring them back and they would escalate the call to the engineers. I'm about to do that. I will direct them to this thread as well so hopefully a definitive fix can be identified and documented. I'll post back if there are any updates after I've spoken to Apple TS.

I am no tech guru. However, I was having the same problem whereby the syncing of the apps was causing iTunes to crash. Now I had already downloaded everything from the cloud with the exception of my music that was held in iTunes on my PC. So, I had all of my apps on my phone already. No need to sync those through iTunes. Therefore, all I had to do to get it to sync my music was to go to iTunes and delete all of the apps. Once that was done, I restarted the music sync and it went fine. I believe the problem is between the different app updates that conflict between the computer and the device.

Thanks VERY much for the help! Have only had the new phone for 3 days and was quite frustrated! Much appreciated!

ok, I figured this out, at least for me.

I have had this problem for a couple months, and spent multiple sessions with apple trying to fix. It went to level 2 support, then further, with lots of things we tried, but no resolution.

I have all my media etc on a NAS, and everyone (including apple) thought it was that. Apple also thought it might be quicktime, and a few other things. We uninstalled/reinstalled several times, remapped the nas drive to a local drive, physically moved the media from the nas to a local drive, none of these things worked.

What DID work was this:

go to APPS in iTunes, select ALL OF YOUR APPS. Right click on them and delete. ALL OF THEM. Note that it doesn't seems to matter if you say to delete the underlying files or not (after you say delete, it gives you a choice to delete the actual file like in iTunes when you delete a song- I tried it both ways, didn't matter).

Once this is done, sync your device.

Note that NONE of your purchases are gone, just the pointers to the files in the media folder (and the physical files themselves if you selected yes when asked). WARNING: You cant just delete them directly from the media/mobile applications folder (I tried that). You HAVE to delete them in iTunes; only there will it delete the pointer that is giving you the problem.

If you want to get all your apps back on your computer (which you don't need to do since they are still on your iphone/ipad device, but you may want to anyway) you have two choices;

1 just wait for them to update, and a new version will be downloaded then. this might take months for all the apps, but again it doesn't really matter since you don't need them locally; or

2 go to iTunes, Apps store, apps. Down at the bottom there will be 'purchased' which you will select, and it will load icons for each app you have downloaded. Now you can either download them one at a time, or select 'download all' and wait. I have over 400 apps, so it takes an hour or so to download them all.

I have now done this technique twice, and it worked both times. So I hope this helps you as well.

Let us know either way if you try this. if this is the solution for everyone, we are done, and don't need apple to do anything further, since it is non destructive.

Same issue here.

iPhone 6+ with new Lightning cable.

Mavericks 10.9.5

iTunes 12.0.1

If I use iTunes to organize my homescreens and app arrangement, iTunes fails to sync the changes 90% of the time. This happens both over WiFi and USB cable. The only way to make it work is make a few changes, sync, then eject and reboot the iPhone, reconnect it, and again I get one try at syncing changes before it loses the iPhone. Often iTunes reports the iPhone as not found despite it being connected and showing up in the left pane in iTunes.

I don't know WTH is going on at Apple, but this level of dysfunction is unprecedented. One of the primary reasons I stayed with iOS is because of the ability to seamlessly sync and manage my iDevices with my Mac. I've used Apple computers and devices since the 80s but all the recent across-the-board dodginess finally has me considering Android (not Windows...yet).