Ugh! Recovering From the Accidental Deletion of an Important iPhone App

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 140mm — 1/2000 sec, f/4.5, ISO 4000 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Muddy Fun

kids' soccer at Mitsuike Sports Ground (三ツ池運動公園) in Kusatsu Japan

Well, that wasn't fun. While at Anthony's soccer game the other day, I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket to find that
a couple of apps had been “pocket deleted”, with the screen showing the dialog to confirm the deletion of a third. Apparently I put
the phone in my pocket without deactivating the screen, and it bumped around in there in the just the appropriate way to
jump through the hoops to delete an app. Twice. I should have had my pocket play the lottery that day.

I've been “pocket dialed” by friends before... the call comes in
and all I hear is background noise or them chatting with someone without
realizing that their phone has called me. This is the first time I've heard
of apps getting deleted by accident this way, and the first time I've
personally experienced my phone doing “pocket” anything, other than sitting
there.

To make things worse, the two apps that had been deleted where the two
apps I use the most (WhatsApp
Messenger and Find
my Friend), and to make it even super worster, those two apps have a
lot of local data (permissions, history, connections, etc.) that are
gone the moment you delete them, requiring a lot of hassle to set up again,
so I couldn't just re-download from the Apple App Store™ and continue on my merry way.
Arrrgh!.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — 1/2000 sec, f/2, ISO 320 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Searching for a Solution

To avoid having to set up the apps again, I had the bright idea of
restoring the phone from a recent backup once I got home. iTunes makes a
backup of the phone data when syncing, and I'd done it recently, so I
though it would be a simple matter of pressing the “restore from backup”
button in iTunes, but no, that results in a frustratingly final error
message: "iTunes could not restore the iPhone because not enough free
space is available on the iPhone." This made no sense to me because I
wasn't asking for a second copy of everything to be added to the phone, but
a simple(?) rsync-like
“make sure what's supposed to be there is actually there” synchronization. It was extra frustrating because the error message gave no hint on how to
proceed.

It turns out that the way around this is to reset the phone to its
factory settings, then restore from backup. After doing the reset,
iTunes treated it as if it was a new phone, asking “Do you want to set this
up as a new phone, or restore from the ‘Jeff's iPhone’ backup we found
lying around?”

I restored from backup, and 40 minutes of “doing stuff” in
the background later, my phone was back to its pre-“pocket delete” glory. I'll have to be more careful next time.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — 1/2000 sec, f/2, ISO 360 —
map & image data — nearby photos

The Right Stuff

pitch warriors