That's the theory some people on a software board are suggesting. That it happened simultaneously on both a pilot's and first officer's iPads suggests that they reached some point on a checklist which called for opening a particular page. And that page's file was corrupt.
Frankly, I'm surprised that the data download process doesn't include a checksum verification (and maybe a signed electronic certificate). You'd want the system to upchuck corrupt data at the time of download, where it might be fixed easily. Not after you've pushed back from the gate.
And then there's the question of why the reading application shuts down the iPad rather than handling the error gracefully.
And the fact that the problem was found on perhaps only B-737's around the same time is another possible clue.
Again, I don't know how they do it at AA, but at some airlines, it seems only one of the iPad's has the 4G/LTE cellular data connection (to save costs, of course) and the data is transferred to the other tablet using AirDrop. I heard an RJ crew discussing this scheme on the hotel van a few weeks back.
The Jepp FD-Pro iPad app is buggy and still very much a work in progress in my opinion. I've done a chart update on an overseas hotel wifi system only to later find out that all of the approach plate headings and page numbers were listed but every chart rendered as a blank page.
I couldn't redo the update since the app showed it had already been updated. Jepp product support was offline during non-business hours in DEN. And my company IT person was more clueless than me. I ended up removing the Jepp app and reinstalling from scratch. And then doing the updates.
I agree that the error checking on this stuff is not yet what you would expect if you bought a $1.99 game app from the Apple Store.
The flight was #1654 and passengers on the flight report that the pilot came on the PA system telling the passengers that his iPad and the first mates had powered off suddenly to a blank screen and that the entire American fleet of 737s had been affected by the outage. The outage left the flight stuck on the tarmac.
Crashed iPads ground several American Airlines flights - SlashGear
Since these news reports use, uh, non-technical terms like 'tarmac' and 'first mates' it's hard to tell in my opinion whether the 'blank screen' mentioned was possibly a faulty Jepp update like I experienced or a system crash of the iPad.
Hopefully some AA folks will chime in here so we can all learn from this snag.