We're not aware of any problems with the Walet app that would cause data loss on upgrade. Our program does not run during upgrade and in the last half-year we have only made User Interface changes without touching data storage at all. We couldn't lose data as a result of upgrade process without deliberately writing code to do so.
In the past there were quite a few people who lost their data when instaling upgrade and the cause was a bug in Apple's iPhohe software that they have acknowledged and fixed about half a year ago. Since then we had exceptionally rare reports of data loss (I think three or less) and none of them had enough information to investigate or follow up. If you are not running the latest version of iPhone Software (iPhone OS) you certainly need to update to the latest version using iTunes.
Another reason people reported data loss was when they would accidentally uninstal the application. When iTunes detects that an app is missing from the iPhone but is present in the iTunes it will (depending on settings) automaticaly install the app on the iPhone, so to the user it looks like the app has never gone anywhere but data was lost. In a different set of circumstances iTunes can actualy uninstall an application from the iPhone on its own initiative if it finds that the applicatin is not present in the iTunes.
Next, at one point we had a "delete" button in our app that was very prominent and surprisingly high number of people (esp children) in just a few days were prone to press the button and even go through the confirmation dialog, also resulting in data loss. This button was since removed from the interface to prevent further incidents.
Finally, it is possible that there are bugs in iTunes application installation routines. Like I said we have no detailed reports so we realy don't what's going on. I don't think we would be able to do much about iTunes problems anyways, other that offering a backup feature (which we kind of already do witht he web site).
If your problem was random, the chance of it reoccuring is less than one in ten thousands. I would go ahead and install the update (after rebooting the iPhone just in case).
Hopefuly this gives you enough information. I apologize for not giving you a definitive answer, but the nature of the problem is seemingly beyond our control. We will do what we can to improve on it - we will add a backup-restore functionality (with no web site requirement) in a later release.
Thanks.
405Group (guest) 29 May 2009 18:49
