Last December, I recounted my brief, unhappy experience with the streaming radio apps that were available for a Blackberry Curve. A week later, I bought an iPhone. I haven’t had any problem launching station streams since then, although keeping them is another matter.

And then the new iPhone and the OS update for existing iPhones were released. Suddenly I was offered updates for all my streaming radio apps. And for a few days after I downloaded them, I found myself with drastically reduced streaming choices.

In WUnderRadio, my stream aggregation app of choice, stations that I had played for months without incident not only failed to load, but now made the app itself abort. About 60% of the stations streamed fine, but I lost many others including some with a pre-roll (e.g., public stations), many foreign broadcasters,and almost anything from The Stream Center—one of several stream directories WR uses in addition to Radiotime.

In other apps that used Radiotime, many of the same stations no longer loaded or were listed as no longer supported. They usually did not cause the app to fail.

Finally, my CBS Radio app wouldn’t open at all. Just clicking on it made it abort. Interestingly, my Canadian group apps (mostly developed by StreamTheWorld) and iHeart Radio did not have any problems.

I apparently was not the only person witha problem. On the iTunes app store listing for Nullriver’s Tuner Internet radio, there were similar comments. (“I loved this program. That is until I just did the update and can no longer connect to any stations.”)

It’s all been resolved in the last 36 hours. I deleted and reloaded CBS Radio. WunderRadio has released another upgrade and the stations in question are working again. But for the best part of a week, installing “upgrades” meant that I lost more than a third of my radio choices.

During streaming radio’s barnstorming days in the mid-to-late ‘90s, it was not uncommon to lose the ability to stream stations every time there was a new update at the station end. Ironically, this problem was worse for Mac users—it was common for stations to get around to the Mac player mere minutes before they did the Windows update that made it obsolete again.

So the first thing I wondered was if everything here had been maximized for users of iPads and new iPhones. I thought I had a smoking gun when somebody with a new iPhone 4.0 told me that he wasn’t having any problems with the same apps; it later turned out that he hadn’t downloaded the particular update that caused me so many problems. But it wouldn’t surprise me if this article makes its way to developers who had no idea that anything was wrong on their shiny new hardware.

Beyond that, it’s probably a good precaution for stations to themselves make sure their streams are working in the various aggregator apps, especially after a major upgrade of this sort. Stations spend a lot of time talking about their streaming apps on the air these days. Making sure they work should be part of any station’s checklist, particularly in a situation such as this one where I still had plenty of other streaming radio to listen to.