Tap Forms reported as 'damaged'? Reboot.

[Brendan]

Hi,

So yesterday and today a lot of customers have been contacting me about Tap Forms being damaged. At least one customer I’ve heard from used the Launchpad to delete Tap Forms in order to re-install. That consequently erased all their data. And unfortunately without having a backup, there’s no recovering.

The issue apparently is that one of Apple’s certificates used in validating the authenticity of an app that was purchased from the Mac App Store had expired. See the following article:

Mac Store Apps Stopped Working Due To Expired Security Certificate

The solution is as simple as rebooting your computer. You will be asked to re-login to the Mac App Store when you try to launch an app. Make sure you login with the same Apple ID you used to initially purchase Tap Forms.

So it’s not something that I did to cause this with my most recent updates. But I sure have been receiving a lot of emails about it. Hopefully some will see this post and be able to get back into Tap Forms quickly.

This was only an issue with the Mac App Store version. Customers who purchased the direct download version of Tap Forms did not experience this trouble.

Thanks!

Brendan

[LeoC2]

It’s not just TF either, several of my apps gave this warning until I discovered I just need to reboot. THANK GOD I didn’t eliminate TF.

HOWEVER… this brings up a point. If deleting TF and reloading wipes out all form data then I think this is a serious flaw Brendan. Why not store the forms and form data in a separate file so if TF should become corrupted for any reason a simple re-install would bring us back to speed.

Leo

[Brendan]

Hi Leo,

But I do store the data in a different location than the application. I’ve never had an application delete all my data if I just throw the application away into the trash. I’m not sure what’s causing the application data from being deleted. But it’s clearly happening outside of Tap Forms out of my control. Tap Forms is what’s called a “sandboxed” application which follows Apple’s best practices for where it should store its data. The data is stored in the following folder:

~/Library/Containers/com.tapforms.mac/Data/Documents

You’ll see that if you look just at the ~/Library/Containers folder that there are a lot of apps which store their data there. I didn’t specifically ask to put the data there. That’s just where Apple puts the data for sandboxed applications.

Thanks,

Brendan

[LeoC2]

But you say these people lost all their data Brendan. One possibility is that if they are running ClenMyMac or something equivalent it asks the user if they ant to do a clean erase, if you click yes then it will erase all associated files. Could that be what happened to them?

[Brendan]

Yes, that could definitely cause that. Apps like App Zapper will do that too. I’m not sure if LaunchPad also does that. But you can delete an app from LaunchPad the same way you delete an app from iOS with the wiggly icons. Definitely when you delete an app from iOS all its data gets deleted too.

[Author]

Posts