Gourmet Live users reporting serious iPad crashes

A number of iPad users are reporting serious problems with Condé Nast’s recently debuted Gourmet Live digital magazine application for the iPad. iLounge editors have discovered that the application causes iPads to lock up completely, requiring a hard reboot to restore normal operation, and what appears to be an extended rebuilding of the iPad’s database thereafter. After several rebuilds, the iPad can become non-responsive and require restoration in iTunes. The problem seems to most commonly occur when downloading “rewards,” or free additional content within the application, which happens automatically while users are reading articles. Numerous review comments on Gourmet Live’s App Store page show a number of similar issues being experienced by other users as well, suggesting that this is not an isolated problem. While it was not unheard of for unstable applications to cause the iPhone and iPod to lock up in the days of iOS 2.x, this behavior has become extremely rare with recent iOS versions, and is the first iPad application we’ve seen to cause serious problems of this nature.