Tip to fix iOS App update problem

This post is about a simple tip.

In my new iPad Pro 11″, after I upgraded to latest iOS 12.3, updated all the installed apps, I was facing a weird problem. Six default apps from Apple were not getting updated. Every time I press Update or Update All, the process will start and stop with no progress. I searched in Apple support, the suggested solutions were to restart the device, to uninstall and to reinstall the app – nothing worked.

The apps that were not getting updated were Apple Store, Numbers, Pages, Clips, iTunes U and iMovie – some of them were stuck with updates from last year (7 Nov 2018). Then it struck me, I have never run these apps, maybe they needed to initialise (I am a programmer, that helps!) before they can update. I tried that – that is I ran all these 6 apps once and then tried to update them. Voila! problem solved, all of them got updated just fine.