We had been noticing this lately ourselves and folks at TheiPhoneBlog have now confirmed it.
There appears to be a bug with iTunes that causes iPhone apps to show that they have new updates available even if none exists.
You can view the bug if you log into the App Store from either your PC, iPhone or iPod touch. If you have an update to be downloaded, you will notice that despite downloading the update multiple times, iTunes shall continue to show that an update to the iPhone app exists.
Apple has not acknowledged the issue so far and the cause of the bug is not known. One possible reason why this is happening could be that that the updates to the iPhone app are not being propagated uniformly across all the Apple servers. As a result, users may actually be downloading the older version of the iPhone app and as a result keep seeing the new update notification. In this case, it is better for the users to wait for a few hours before trying another download since it is more likely for the iPhone app to be uniformly propogated by this time.
Another reason why this could be occurring is if iTunes fails to register your download, in which case it shall continue to notify you. If you have been seeing this bug on your iPhone, you may try rebooting your iPhone. Hard reset too seems to have worked, though not many would want to try this fix. In any case if the issue persists, wait for a few hours before trying to download the app again.
We are not sure if this problem is universal at the moment. In that case, the bug could highly impact those iPhone users who are on metered data plans. Considering iPhone apps like TomTom are more than a gigabyte in size, a bug as this could spike your telephone bill heavily.
Please let us know if you are seeing this bug on your iPhone. Also, do tell us if you are able to fix it at your end.
[via The iPhone Blog]
