Apple quietly fixed the apps affected by corrupt App Store binaries in an interesting way.

Rather than remove the 1-star reviews — as far as I can tell, they’re all still there — it appears that Apple has triggered a reupdate on the affected apps, Instapaper included. This means:

All reviews for the “current version” are reset, since there’s a new current version.

The fixed binaries will show up as “Updates” in the App Store app and iTunes.

The latter is a big deal. Without that, the only easy way for customers to force their phones to download a working version was to delete the broken app and redownload it from the Store.

For Instapaper, that was just an inconvenience, since almost everything is stored on and synced from the service. But for apps that stored data locally, that often meant data loss, or progress lost in games.

By republishing “updates” to these apps, Apple is helping users avoid deleting them and losing their data.

Nice move, Apple.