bug

Weird Jetpack iOS App Happenings on iPhone

Fandango8 Comments

I’m creating this post more as a means to communicate with the Happiness Engineers at Jetpack than to whine to those of you reading this post. There has recently been an issue when I go to the home page of the Jetpack app for iOS. I expect to see this page:

Figure 1

But instead I see this page:

Figure 2

I tried to open up a case with the tech support (i.e., Happiness Engineers), but when I went to attach these two images, the ticket wouldn’t let me upload them, so I thought I’d write a post and attach it to the ticket.

For the information of the Happiness Engineers follows:

I’m using an Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max running iOS 16.5 and Jetpack iOS 22.5. Recently, within the past few weeks, one in every four or five times I go to the home page on the Jetpack iOS app, instead of seeing the screenshot in Figure 1, I see the screenshot shown in Figure 2. It persists until I reboot my iPhone. Only then will the “normal” Home page be displayed. Until the next time the “funky” Home page pops up again.

Can you please look into this for me and let me know if you’ll be able to fix this.

To my WordPress friends, I’m going to delete this post once I hear back from the Happiness Engineers.

Thanks for your patience.

Heads Up: Disappearing Not Spam

Fandango11 Comments

Yesterday afternoon I was going through my Spam folder and deleting actual spam comments. There are occasionally legitimate comments that get swept up in the Akismet net, and I generally tap “Not Spam” and then the not spam “spam” comment goes into the Pending folder. And then I can read the comment in the Pending folder and approve it and it’s all good.

When I did that yesterday for one comment, after I hit “Not Spam,” nothing showed up in my Pending folder. Nor did the “Not Spam” comment show up in my Approved folder. It just disappeared. Okay, I chalked it up to a fluke. I was on my iPhone and maybe, instead of hitting Not Spam, I hit something else. Or maybe it was some one-time issue with WordPress.

But it happened again just now. I saw a legitimate comment in my Spam folder and I very deliberately tapped Not Spam. And once again, that comment did not then show up in my Pending comments folder as they have always done in the past. And it did not show up in my Approved comments folder either. Just like yesterday, it disappeared! It vanished! Poof, it was gone..

So I don’t know if this is a new bug that cropped up for everyone, or if it’s a new bug on the WordPress iOS app. But I’m just sending everyone a heads up.

Too Bad, So Sad, Now Go Away

Fandango22 Comments

A few weeks ago I posted this post about a problem with the WordPress iOS app that cropped up in November 2020 and which, almost two years later, still persists. I sent a copy of my post to the Happiness Engineers and the response I got was essentially telling me that the app wasn’t intended to work the way I wanted it to — and the way it used to work — on the WordPress iOS app.

We’re aware of this problem starting on WordPress app v 16.0. We created a report with all the details about this bug in 2020. Right now, we’re not currently working on fixing this issue. The primary function of the in-app browser is to preview content (instead of interacting), so we’ve been concentrating on high-priority features and other bugs.

Then I asked, “Why is this bug not present on Android?”

The Android and iOS apps have entirely different codebases, which means that, for the most part, a bug on one OS doesn’t replicate on another OS.

To this I responded, “First of all, you just confirmed that this is a bug, one you seem to have no intent to fix. Second of all, if, as you wrote, ‘The primary function of the in-app bowser is to preview content (instead of interacting)…,’ it’s interesting that, before the WordPress iOS 16.0 update, the app did support interacting and not just previewing, and apparently still does work that way on the WordPress Android mobile app.

And finally, the Happiness Engineer wrote:

I understand that this is not good news and how frustrating it can be. If there’s anything else, we can help you with, please let us know.

Anything else they can help me with? Seriously? What help? No, this is not good news and I’m not happy with the answer, which is essentially fuck off, Fandango.

The Problem Persists

Fandango54 Comments

First, let me apologize, as this post is a bit of a rant about WordPress.

Prior to downloading what was then, in November 2020, the latest update (version 16.0) to the WordPress iOS app, I never had a problem liking and leaving comments on other bloggers’ posts. That was almost two years ago and, despite dozens of exchanges with numerous Happiness Engineers, the issue still persists. It’s got me, like the guy in the iStockphoto picture above, pulling my hair out…what little of it I have left, anyway.

What is the specific issue? Well, I’ve posted about this numerous times, including here, here, here, and here. But as a quick recap, I noticed that I could no longer, from either my Reader or my Notifications, “like” some other bloggers’ posts nor could I leave a comment on them. It was as if, even though I was logged on to WordPress via the app, the app didn’t recognize me as a logged-on WordPress user when I went to those sites.

After doing a lot of troubleshooting on my own, I realized that I could like and leave comments on posts where the blogger’s address had “.wordpress.com” in it. But for those blogs that didn’t have “.wordpress.com” in the blog address — even my own blog, which is “fivedotoh.com” — I could not like or comment on them when I visited them.

In my back and forth with various Happiness Engineers, I was told that the bug had been identified and replicated and that the app development team was working on a fix. I was also told that the issue was complicated by some security changes that Apple made when it launched iOS 14.0.

In order to leave a comment on blogs that don’t have “wordpress.com” in the address, I need to enter in my name, my email address, and my blog’s URL, after which I’m taken to the WordPress iOS app login screen to enter my password. Only then will my comment be posted. On other blogs I’m told I must log on in order to leave a comment, even though I already am logged on to WordPress. And when I try to log back in, it still won’t let me leave a comment. Very frustrating.

Flash forward to today. The iOS app from WordPress I have installed on my iPhone is version 20.5.01 and the Apple iOS app is version 15.6.1. I have eagerly awaited each of the updated releases to the WordPress app in the hope that the bug will have been fixed, only to be disappointed when I discover that it’s still there. 

So, after nearly two frustrating years, and countless assurances by Happiness Engineers that the issue will be fixed, it still hasn’t been fixed. WordPress has a very large presence on the internet. Apple is one of the major technology (both hardware and application) providers in the world. You would think that, between WordPress and Apple, they would be able to figure out a way to fix this very annoying bug so that the WordPress app could work just as it did prior to release of version 16.0 in November 2020.

I’m not holding my breath.

WordPress Responds

Fandango26 Comments

If you read my response last week to Paula Light’s The Monday Peeve, I was on a rant complaining how, for more than a year now, the WordPress iOS app for the iPhone was causing issues with my ability to both like and comment on some other bloggers’ posts.

I opened up a support message and attached a link to my TMP rant. This is what I got in response:

Hi again, Fandango,


Thank you for reporting this! I’ve tested this, and I could reproduce it on WordPress.com sites with a custom domain. In my case, I couldn’t like a post at all, even after a refresh. My “likes” didn’t get saved on the post, and this is frustrating! I understand how annoying this is. We will keep a close eye on this one.


This is similar to the issue that the WebView (Apple’s library for providing a web browser experience within an iOS app) doesn’t recognize that we’ve logged in to the app and WordPress.com. I have reported this as a bug to be looked into by the developers, but as you already know, I can’t promise you a timeline for when this will be fixed. However, I will highlight this to the team and hope they can prioritize this bug since it’s been happening since iOS 14 was launched.


Once again, thank you very much for your time in reporting this. We appreciate your patience while we look into this matter.

Note the “Hi again, Fandango.” Obviously this happiness engineer was one of those who was involved last year when I exchanged myriad emails with the support team. At least she agreed that this bug is frustrating and annoying. But once again, she seemed to be assigning blame to Apple for the issue. She committed, just as she did last year, to have the WordPress developers “look into” this, but failed to offer a timeframe for resolution. Again, this bug surfaced almost 13 months ago.

I wrote back and said this:

I hope your developers will give this issue a high priority. One of my blogging friends suggested that I switch from my iPhone to an Android device, but no one should have to do that in order to use the WordPress app for a smartphone. I’m sure there are many WordPress users who, like me, blog primarily on their iPhones, so this bug must be affecting a lot of us and is seriously detrimental to our WordPress blogging experience.

Here’s the response I received…from a different happiness engineer:

I agree and we understand how frustrating this is. We will keep a close eye on this one. Thank you again for reporting it. We really appreciate that.

So things are pretty much as they have been for more than a year. An acknowledgment that there is a problem, that it’s frustrating and annoying, and that they’re going to have their developers look into it. And, once again, no ETA on when I might anticipate a resolution.

Déjà vu all over again.