A trick that might help your stalled app downloads
I ran into a problem recently when ebooks purchased or borrowed from Amazon’s Kindle store wouldn’t download to the company’s iPad app. After some frustrating attempts to keep downloading the same digital files over and over, seeing them get to 50 or 60 percent and then stalling out, I dug online for a solution and found that short of asking Amazon for customer support, one solution was to try to de-register the device under the app’s settings and then log back in to Amazon to re-register the iPad.
The trick worked; soon the ebooks I had access to were downloading again just fine. It was a reminder that with most cloud-based services where you buy games, books, TV shows or other digital content, you’re not going to lose that content by deleting an app or disabling a device that accesses those purchases. In fact, most apps are smart enough to remember where you left off in a book or movie if you delete it and then download it again later.
In the Amazon Kindle app’s case, I’m still not sure exactly why my downloads weren’t working, but by the time I got it working again, I really didn’t care. If you encounter a similar issue, deleting the offending app and reinstalling it is one thing to try, in the same vein as how shutting down/restarting an internet router or rebooting a computer that’s freaking out can sometimes be a simple cure-all for mysterious tech problems.
In this space every week, we’ll define a tech term, offer a timely tip or answer questions about technology from readers. Email ogallaga@ statesman.com.