iPhone: Can my Leaking App harm other apps?

Question

So, I finished writing my first iPhone App, and I have sent it out to a group of beta testers. Everybody is happy, except for this one guy who noticed that after having run my app, another app is not starting up anymore.

Not knowing too much about memory management, I started looking at the Leaks graphs in Instruments, and noticed, that there are some leaks going on in my app.

Three questions:

1. Are leaks always bad? The biggest leak is 15k on a total of 5,1 MB allocated memory.
2. Will Apple refuse my app because of leaks?
3. Is not all the memory automatically freed up as soon as my app quits? Could it be that my leaking app is harmful to other apps?

Thanks Sjakelien

Answer 1

Each app is supposed to run in its own "sandbox," and is by design not supposed to affect any other app installed on the phone. If your reviewer found a case where your app really did affect another app, that's definitely not your fault, although I'd love to know how that was accomplished ;).

My guess is, though, that your reviewer's other app broke completely independently of your app, and he/she is spuriously attributing the fault to your app. Ask him to try to reproduce the problem (uninstall both apps, install the other app, install your app).