app updates - iTunes store temporarily unavailable

I saw your post, but I don't have auto updates turned on, on any of the ios devices. I believe this problem relates to iTunes on the Mac and not to the ios devices. Even though, if you update the apps on your ios devices through the app store on the ios devices, then you don't really need to do the updates through iTunes on the mac. All you are doing is keeping a copy of the apps. Even so, it would be nice to have the engineers find out why this used to work and now intermittently works.

In my case, the safe-mode reboot did not help.

Whoops , different soution, let me try yours.

Although you may be right, I have to say that I just tried Steve BC's solution and (to my surprise) it worked for me.

I didn't think this was going to work--but it did! It's a drag to have to choose between the two update methods, however. If iTunes would enable auto-update for iOS apps, that would be ideal.

Thanks for the news, Polks. I'm delighted to hear the solution worked for you. Now let's hope it stays in working order. :-)

Maybe the Apple folks can check this idea out and find if there really is something wrong here. I wouldn't think it would be hard to include a check of the two app databases and a conformance action before downloading app updates in iTunes.

As you say, it would be nice if we didn't have to choose between the two approaches to updates but could just do both.

I just started having this problem today. I couldn't download anything from any device. When I logged into my apple id, it even told me that my payment information was unavailable. So, I made sure all auto downloads were turned off and -- BAM -- I could download from my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad.

Strangest thing EVER. Thanks for the tip Steve BC

GeeAMouse, that's great news. I've not had any problem since I turned off auto-updating, except for once. I updated my iOS while my iPhone was plugged into my Mac, went to get app updates, and had a similar but slightly different issue. Thinking that the iOS update might have affected things, I quit iTunes (I think), and I may have rebooted my iPhone but don't think so. Anyway, the problem went away when I reopened iTunes and started the app updates.

I think the issue is a mismatch between the app update data on iOS on my iPhone and what iTunes was expecting to see, given the apps in its Library. Since I don't manually update apps on my iPhone between updates via my Mac's iTunes application and have turned off auto-update, there is no mismatch. I noticed when I had this problem that the apps that were causing iTunes on my Mac to hang during the "download updates" process were ones that had been automatically updated in between my full iTunes updates.

You're welcome! 🙂

Turning off Auto Updates worked for me - cheers guys!