woke up, and my camera, appstore, podcasts, and other apps were gone on my iPhone 5s

[jordo73]

Missing your phone? App store? The strangest thing happened yesterday. I woke up and went to work, but on the drive in (yes, I check my phone when I drive), I noticed a different arrangement of the apps on my home screen. WTF? I was missing my camera! Because I use my iPhone to document photos at work, I was getting really nervous because my camera app was missing. After a whole day of not being able to take photos, I called verizon around 3/4ish, and found out this issue was because I left my phone plugged in (charging) overnight, and since it was connected to wifi it "probably" automatically updated to 9.3.1. My iPhone is v 9.2.1, so not a big upgrade, but Verizon said they have seen a lot of problems on their user network with this. They said Apple even pulled the 9.3.1 update until there is a fix.

I spoke with about 2-3 people at Verizon (great customer service, by the way), and they eventually put me through to a tech at Apple, because the issue was over their heads. All said, it took about 2 hours on the phone, and I ended up losing

In the meantime - this is what you've got to do if you find that for some reason you've lost your phone app, you app store app, or podcast app - or others!

1. make sure you are connected to a reliable wi-fi spot, and check to make sure you have a recent backup...!!! very important!!! They told me to back up before going to step 2 below, and I did, and then they told me to restore to that backup, but after I did that it turns out my phone was restored to the corrupted busted setup...!!! SUPER ANNOYING!!! So use a previous restore more than a day old (you'll lose some text messages, but if you are ok with that - I recommend it).

2. go to settings > general > reset > erase all content and settings

3. restore your phone from a previous back up

I sincerely hope this helps anyone else who come across this. It wasted about 2 hours of my night. I have a 2 year old, a pregnant wife, my dad just died, and we just moved into a new house, plus I'm going through my dad's estate belongings, so when you add in this additional stress, its just like, WTF? Totally unneccessary.