GSRegisterPurpleNamedPort SIGABRT in UIApplicationMain Before App Delegate Gets to Run Any Code

Question

We recently put an update out for one of our apps and many users told us that they could no longer run the app because it crashed on startup.

We have been able to re

Answer 1

Is this under iOS 4.0? This type of error had been reported to occur when a process or thread from the previous install of this app has crashed and somehow hasn't been cleaned up by the OS yet or has hung up in the debugger.

Does a reboot of the iPhone after installation of the new version of the app cause this error to go away? That would be one good indication that something is stuck/corrupted in the OS from the previous install, rather than in the app bundle itself.

Answer 2

I've been having the same issue (thankfully I caught it before submitting to the AppStore). Unlike this answer states, the issue still occurs on iOS 5.x and 6.x.

So I went into the Console and found a few messages were logged before my app crashed. First was this message:

com.apple.launchd.peruser.503[148]: (UIKitApplication:BUNDLE-ID[0x4fb5][20462]) The following job tried to hijack the service "BUNDLE-ID-1" from this job: UIKitApplication:BUNDLE-ID-1[0xac31]

The next message in the console displays immediately afterwards:

GSRegisterPurpleNamedPort Couldn't register BUNDLE ID with the bootstrap server. Error: unknown error code (1100). This generally means that another instance of this process was already running or is hung in the debugger.

The crash is caused by another almost identical process already running on the system. It sounds like an issue with iOS not the app itself. This should help clear things up. Best thing to do would probably be to tell users to quit the app, try restarting and open again.

I've also submitted a bug report to Apple detailing the issue.

EDIT: It looks as though this might have been an issue with Xcode itself. Apple has just released an update which should fix the issue (at least in the Simulator):