Ah what a swell idea, spend several hundred dollars on a new device to try and load a broken game....
Well actually it was breaking on our iPhone 5s and 6s so your solution is not logical....
My best guess is that this is a problem within the server push vs free space on the device or perhaps several pushes needed to to actually fully download a complete update as one of the iPhones started to stabilize after nuking the app and reinstalling then it crashed on loading 6 times before finally coming back up and now seems less crash prone then the other phones I have not done this too.
Bottom line, dev dropped the ball again by not sufficently testing before releasing...