A few days ago, I was working in my office when I picked up my iPhone to look up something. I glanced at my home screen as I prepared to launch an app and then did a double-take. Something wasn't right. The first thing I noticed was that there were only three icons at the bottom of my screen instead of the normal four, and then I saw that there was an empty spot on the first of my home screen pages, which is never the case. I didn't think to take a picture at the time, so here is a dramatic reenactment of what I saw:
It took me a few seconds to figure out what was gone, and then I realized that the Safari and the Camera icons were missing. My first thought was that one of my kids must have gotten a hold of my iPhone and deleted an app, so I started to wonder how I could restore a missing app while I was in my office (considering that I sync my iPhone with my home computer). But then I realized that the missing apps — Safari and Camera — are built-in apps. You cannot delete those apps on the iPhone. You can, however, move them around, so I started to swipe through screens to see if my kids had moved them. But again, no luck.
Because I was trying to get work done at the time, I put down my iPhone and decided to try to resolve this issue later. But then ten minutes later, one of my partners called me to ask me how to get her Safari icon to come back. I asked her if her Camera app was also missing, and after she looked she confirmed that sure enough it was missing too. So at that point I knew that the problem was not unique to my iPhone. A quick Google search revealed that there was not some worldwide Safari and Camera outage on the iPhone affecting everyone else, but I did run across this article on the Apple website: Knowledge Base Article HT3582 "iOS: Restoring a missing Camera or Safari Application."
The article explains: "If your iOS device is configured to use an Exchange account, your Exchange Server administrator may have configured your account with a policy to disallow use of Safari or the Camera." Bingo. I contacted someone in my law firm's IT department, and it turns out that a tech person was in the process of doing something to configure an iPhone when he accidentally flipped a switch that turned off the Safari and Camera apps for an entire set of users. Ouch. Apparently, the IT folks realized the problem and then fixed it, and within a few hours the two apps had reappeared.
I was afraid that they wouldn't reappear without some additional intervention. The Apple article says: "This policy will remain in effect until you delete the Exchange account from the device. This is true even if your Exchange Server administrator later relaxes the policy to allow use of Safari or the Camera—the iOS device will not recognize the policy change. To restore use of Safari or the Camera, you will need to delete the Exchange account from the device." That wasn't my experience at all. After a few hours, the apps just reappeared again, on their own.
I don't know how common a problem this is, but I must not be the only person to fall victim to it for Apple to see the need to draft and post a Knowledge Base article, last modified on July 19, 2010. If you use your iPhone in a corporate environment and you ever discover that the Safari and/or Camera apps are missing, hopefully you will remember this post and know that you should blame the IT department, not the kids.
[UPDATE: As noted by several people in the Comments to this post, another possible cause for this sort of problem is the Restrictions setting. Go to Settings -> General -> Restrictions and make sure that they are turned off. If they are turned on, one or more built-in apps can be made to not appear.]
