Thursday, December 21, 2017

How I Fixed The Stupid System Error in the Starbucks App

So, I recently got myself a new phone. Switched from Android to iOS (because I never tried an iPhone before). Now, having payment options and loyalty cards right on your phone is pretty handy. So, I downloaded the Starbucks app, among others. However, I could not log in. I kept getting a message that said "We're sorry, a system error occurred. Please try again later." No matter how many times I tried again later, I could not get rid of this error. Strangely enough, it worked on my old phone, and still worked on my work phone (both of which are Android). Usually a search with this phrase would bring up plenty of fixes, but unfortunately all could find was other frustrated people unable to get it to work. Looking at the reviews in the App Store, I could see some people having this problem, but mostly it worked fine for people.

Uninstalling, reinstalling, and rebooting didn't work. None of the fixes that I did find worked for me (one was talking about turning off and back on the automatic clock, for some reason). What finally got me along the path to fixing my issue was reading about how someone tried to make a new account instead of signing into their old account. So, I tried that on a whim... and it worked. Now I'm thoroughly confused. But something did stick out to me when making the new account, and it was the password requirements, which made it mandatory to have a lower case letter, upper case letter, number, and special character. On this dummy account, I wanted the password to be as simple as possible, so I just used a single special character. Contrast that to the password on my current account, which was a complex random password generated in LastPass.

That's a long way of getting to the point. But here's how I fixed the system error: I changed my password. I used a single special character in the new password, and it worked like a charm. I don't know why this was an issue... maybe it's something about iOS and special characters (because I had plenty... #, @, !, %, etc).

So, if anyone stumbles onto this page with the same error, I just wanted to suggest this fix and hope it works for you.

10 comments:

  1. omg this worked for me too - i was going insane. thank you! weird.

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    1. I'm happy it worked. When I had the problem I couldn't find any info about it, so I hoped that maybe this would help someone else eventually.

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  2. I did the opposite. I went from iphone to android...now I have the error message and I only have 1 special character in my password now...help!

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    1. I'm not really sure. Maybe try a different special character? This was all a while ago and I seem to remember that one character just was not being accepted (I can't remember if it was # or ! or % or whatever). Good luck.

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  3. I get an error message immediately as soon as I open the app. I also get it everytime I try to sign in.

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  4. Me too! I have $ as my special character and still system error

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  5. I have tried every single special character and I can not get it to let me in

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  6. I used 11 letters, one number, then the ! Give it a try!

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  7. You saved me, then a few weeks later.. back to the same BS. This app’s authentication is ridiculously bad for such a huge company.

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