Two weeks ago, I had been experiencing for several weeks “Unable to Purchase At This Time” warning message on my iPhone when I tried to purchase and download an app from the App Store. I googled around and found that it has to do with a bug in iOS 7. There were several recommendations on how to fix it. The one solution that worked for me was to change the keyboard from “US” to “US International” keyboard (Setting ->General -> Keyboard-> Keyboard then select “English – US International” instead of “US”). After power cycling the iPhone by holding Sleep & Home buttons at the same time, now I was able to purchase and downloads Apps on the App Store. All the Apps were queued up to download all of the sudden. I thought that was the end of the story. But no, yesterday, the problem acted up again. This time, I selected “English – US Extended” keyboard and it started working again. I suspected this bug may have something to do with the fact that I have turned on several keyboards (English + Chinese).

Also, about the same time, I was experiencing a constant prompting for Apple ID and Password for the iCloud backup on my iPad. I applied the same trick and I haven’t seen the problem since.

So there you have it. Switching around US keyboards among all US keyboards may fix the problem. What a strange bug it is!