Confused and annoyed by your apps in iOS 13.5? You're not alone.
With iOS 13.5 releasing this week, it was supposed to be a smooth, bug free rollout.
Not so fast.
Even though nothing was reported during the Public Beta, several users (including my own son) have been hit by an annoying, but fixable bug.
When you try to open an app, you get the message "This app is no longer shared with you" and goes on to say "To use it, you must buy it from the App Store."
Clicking the View in App Store link takes you to the app's App Store entry where there’s a very unhelpful Open button. Click that an you'll find yourself in a recursive loop.
How To Fix It
First, try turning your device off and then on again. That's had limited success for a few.
The next option (or the first if you don't feel like sitting through a reboot) is to delete the app, then reinstall it from the App Store. Don't worry, the apps that are most affected by this bug, like Twitter and Facebook, are cloud apps that don't store any of your data locally.
Once you reinstall the app, you can log back in and use it as normal.
Why Did This Happen?
Honestly, no one is sure. It's unusual, but not unheard of for third-party apps to have unforeseen issues with a new release of iOS. However, iOS 13.5 (and the unreleased iOS 13.4.5 before it) was remarkable in how unerringly stable it was.
It could be that Apple's own authentication servers are having some sort of problem recognizing authorized devices. If that's the case, we could be seeing a lot more of this type of issue in the coming days.
Hopefully, though, this is just a slightly annoying blip and we'll all be back to social media soon complaining about how our phones kept us off of it for an agonizing few minutes.
