Here at Cult of Mac, we love Mailbox, the third-party Gmail client for iOS. But since it was optimized for iOS 7, it has been plagued by a hugely frustrating bug that causes email accounts to be deleted at random. Fortunately, the app’s latest update — which is available from the App Store now — finally fixes the problem.
But at what cost?
It’s unclear what was causing the issue, but lots of Mailbox users were opening the app to find that their Gmail accounts had been deleted, and that they needed to set them up again. Strangely, Mailbox continued to send push notifications for incoming emails — although it seemed as though there was no account set up.
I first heard about this issue last week, but I was lucky enough to dodge it until this Sunday. Since then, however, Mailbox has deleted my Gmail account twice. I actually downloaded the official Gmail app and decided to use that until the issue was fixed, because I couldn’t face setting up my account a fourth time knowing it would be deleted again.
Thankfully, the issue has now been rectified in Mailbox version 1.6.2, however, the Mailbox team has had to disable the app’s background refresh feature temporarily.
“The root cause lies somewhere in our interaction with Apple’s new Background Refresh feature.”
“Much of our team has spent the last five days in crisis mode trying to diagnose the bug, and we currently believe the root cause lies somewhere in our interaction with Apple’s new Background Refresh feature,” reads a post on the Mailbox blog.
“This morning Apple approved version 1.6.2. which disables background refresh to temporarily bypass the problem. We’ll keep working with Apple and the developer community for a more long-term fix, but in the meantime we hope this will clear up the logout issue.”
This isn’t too much of a problem; you should still receive push notifications when new emails arrive — it just means you’ll need to refresh your inbox manually when you open up the app. You shouldn’t miss any important emails while background refresh is enabled.
Mailbox 1.6.2 is available to download from the App Store now. Of course, if you’ve enabled automatic app updates in iOS 7, you may already be running the latest version — but it’s ready to download now for those who choose to install their updates manually.
Source: App Store
Via: Mailbox Blog
