Issue 7: Makes iPhone unusable - "Army of Marching Ants"
Status:  Accepted
Owner: ----
Reported by jennytwo...@googlemail.com, Sep 23, 2007
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. From what I can tell, install NES application and Ants at the same time
and you have yourself an Ants virus!
2.
3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Phone totally crashes. Turn it on, you get black and white flashing lines
and an army of ants walking over the Apple sign

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
one provided by nullriver iInstaller and firmware 1.0

Please provide any additional information below.
This has a text book virus feel, Very serious, had to reunlock and everything!
Sep 24, 2007
#1 jennytwo...@googlemail.com
another thing. I intstalled summer board all at the same time, and summer board
requires a restart. I think something with summerboard and or nes install collides
with ants and causes it to behave like a virus
Sep 24, 2007
Project Member #2 gabe.sch...@gmail.com
jenny,

did simply restarting your phone clear it up?

this used to happen to me consistently on startup before I added code to make sure that 
SpringBoard/SummerBoard was running before launching Ants. it seems there's some kind of UI race condition 
(which produces undeniably odd behavior). 
Summary: Makes iPhone unusable - "Army of Marching Ants"
Status: Accepted
Sep 25, 2007
#3 jennytwo...@googlemail.com
Gabe,

Thanks for contacting me, at least my iphone is working now :) No restart did not
help, did it several times. After 2 minutes of flashing you might be able to get to
the menu but then it would lock, it would appear to load very slowly, as if there was
a race for memory or something, or 100% CPU? . Anyway, from what your saying, it
would appear that installed ants and then summerboard creates this condition if you
have not first restarted. perhaps your race condition checks for an activated
summerboard but not an initial summerboard install, thats probably what got the phone
trapped.

Hope you find the problem
Oct 30, 2007
#4 sange...@gmail.com
Gabe,

I'm having the same problem I can't even boot now.  It just locks my iphone up to the
point it won't boot at all.
Dec 3, 2007
#5 kath12...@yahoo.com
it just happen to my phone, what will i do? no matter how i re-start it, it wont go 
away?? 
May 4, 2008
#6 dan...@mordecki.com
Hi, I have my iphone completely briked wiht a 2nd war ants army on it. No reboot, no
answers. It gets off and on randomly. I'm waiting for the battery to fully discharge
to have a full reboot. 
Any idea?
antsIphone.jpg
274 KB   View   Download
May 15, 2008
#7 dave.suk...@gmail.com
any solutions to this prblm found as yet?
Jun 29, 2008
#9 charlie....@gmail.com
I have a similar issue - I saw the flashing bars on the bootup screen and an army of
ants on each side. I tried
syncing while the bars were up, and iTunes was happy to do it. Next boot up gave me a
home screen, seconds later covered in ants that seemed to max my cpu. I opened the
Ants app, and saw that max ants had been boosted to 700000. At this point, I tried to
disable, but the app was unresponsive. I used SSH to delete the Ants app and rebooted
the phone.  The ants were still there, though - even without the app in the
Application folder, and even after another reboot.

I went back into Installer.app, expecting that I could re-install Ants, then
uninstall it. It was in my app list, though, so I tried uninstalling right away.
Installer got hung up, I had to reboot again.  This time I made it quickly to the
uninstall screen before the ants could overrun the cpu. I uninstalled, and bingo - I
am free.



Jul 10, 2008
#10 rahulr...@gmail.com
For crying out loud!! The freaking ants have taken over the phone!! I thought it
might be fun to see what a whole bunch of ants would do to my phone, i had a good
laugh the first time, and stopped it before it gout out of hand. 
But, mistake number one, i left the app on the phone, today one of my friends went
back to Ants, and triggered a meltdown. The last thing I've tried is to delete the
Ants folder from the phone using 'DeskAid'. Surprise, surprise.. the ants are still
taking over my phone. And yeah, I'm getting those flashy white bars on start up too. 
I was thinking back to when i used BossPrefs to move all the apps from the OS space
to the main phone memory, and how the apps folder may be hiding somewhere else. Gonna
try looking for it now.
Jul 10, 2008
#11 rahulr...@gmail.com
Woo Hoo!! 
Figured out how to get rid of the damn app.. Apart from the Ants folder in the
Applications folder, there are a few more files that u'll have to get rid off.. Here
they are:

Root\Applications\Ants  (You knew this one)
Root\Library\LaunchDaemons\net.schine.ants.plist
Root\usr\local\bin\ants_daemon\    (Delete the whole folder)
Root\usr\local\share\ants\   (Again, get rid of the whole folder)

And thats it.. Delete all these files\folders, and ur done :-)
Jul 10, 2008
#12 rahulr...@gmail.com
How to get rid of (uninstall) Ants app..

(For the google spiders)
Jul 14, 2008
Project Member #13 gabe.sch...@gmail.com
Although I still couldn't tell you what whackiness causes the "bug", it's actually
laughably easy to get around this: just hit the sleep/wake button on the top of the
phone. 

You will immediately be launched to the home screen, as expected.