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Many Apple properties work only after repeated attempts

Since around two weeks, many requests to Apple properties (App Store, Apple Music etc.) fail resulting in “Connection to App Store failed” messages, podcasts that won’t download etc. 

The logs do not show any blocked requests. Enabling or disabling blocklists and other features seem to have no real effect. Explicitly whitelisting tens of Apple (sub)domains also does not solve the problem.

If a site or service fails to load, I retry many times. Sometimes by the 5th, sometimes by the 50th try the requests succeeds. Sometimes even retries do not help.  

One method that always works is disabling NextDNS. From that moment onwards, requests to Apple services resume to work immediately. 

On Reddit I’ve seen multiple people reporting the same issue: https://reddit.com/r/nextdns/comments/vqi7zz/issues_reaching_apple_services_like_app_store/

57 replies

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    • rediguana
    • 1 yr ago
    • Reported - view

    Only recently started using NextDNS in the past few days and having exactly this problem. Blocks don't show in logs, but a lot of Apple services are blocked. Have tried whitelisting apple domains. Any updates on a resolution to this problem? I've found the only reliable solution is to point the network DHCP DNS servers back to Cloudflares (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1).

      • rediguana
      • 1 yr ago
      • Reported - view

      I take my comment back. It turns out that I had blocked India in my firewall, which is where New Zealand appears to be served from by Apple. By unblocking India, NextDNS now appears to be working correctly.

    • Agi_Ga
    • 1 yr ago
    • Reported - view

    Is there any update on that topic? For me I do have this issues as well. Changing DNS profile does solve it immediately and/or several attempts also... But quite annoying. 

    Also tried out AdGuard DNS - it does have the same issues! Nothing within query logs is blocked but the issues are still there.

    • Nomax2000
    • 6 mths ago
    • Reported - view

    Since two days customer and same issue. No updates or apps in general from the iOS App Store are downloadable. It was a mistake to pay for this service.

      • Jos
      • 6 mths ago
      • Reported - view

      It's flawless here. Must be something in your setup or chosen blocklist(s).

    • Darkos
    • 7 days ago
    • Reported - view

    Hello all,

    I have the same issue on all my Apple devices with Apple services for months, everything that others experienced, I also have - App store updates excruciatingly slow, some of them not updating until the button is pressed multiple times etc. Absolutely nothing is blocked in logs. Disabling NextDNS instantly solves the issue for good, changing NextDNS profiles solves it for a very short time.

    I have tried every possible combination, including new profiles with absolutely zero settings enabled and zero block lists - the same behaviour. Sometimes it works, only to not work again the next time...even devices on the same profile behave differently. It happened for me also in 2024 for a while (connecting the dots now), but this year everything went downhill.

    This is my 5th year using NextDNS (paid version) and it might be the last, because it's absolutely unacceptable for a team that sells a software program to not be able to troubleshoot and solve this issue for years.

      • Agi_Ga
      • 6 days ago
      • Reported - view

       The issue also exists with AdGuard DNS. So it's not a NextDNS issue only. Don't know, what's happening here - but must be something weird.

      With ControlD I didn't see the issue at all. So it must be something  with DNS.

      • Darkos
      • yesterday
      • Reported - view

      Hello, 

      Yes, all other classic DNS resolvers have no issue with Apple updates. As soon as I disable NextDNS, it works instantly. I have also heard someone switched from NextDNS to ADGuard as a last resort to solve this, but it happened there also.

      I have traced the communications from iPhone using a a cable and Wireshark and there are a lot of dropped packets when NextDNS is on. When using my ISP DNS Apple servers connect to iPhone using TLS 1.3 and packet length 1496 bytes. Switch to NextDNS and TLS is downgraded to version 1.2 and pachet length is 1500 bytes when data is transferred. The tracking log gets filled with "ignored unknown record", "previous segment not captured" messages. I am not an network expert, but this is the clear main difference that I saw.

      Apple updates NextDNS OFF Apple updates NextDNS ON
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