iTunes 12.7

From linked Apple article above.

"The new iTunes focuses on music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and audiobooks. Apps for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch are now exclusively available in the new App Store for iOS. And the new App Store makes it easy to get, update, and redownload apps—all without a Mac or PC."

Apple has posted a dmg of iTunes 12.6.3 (the previous version that does manage apps). This is primarily for businesses that need iTunes to manage apps on multiple phones. You can install 12.6.3 from this (replacing 12.7), and you will not be alerted to install future versions of iTunes going forward. It does work with iOS 11. For some, this may be worth a try. If it doesn't play out well, you can later download 12.7. Deploy apps in a business environment with iTunes - Apple Support

See Managing apps with iTunes 12.7 or later. If you restore a backup of your device made with iTunes 12.7 or later then the layout of apps and the apps themselves get restored too. Installing 12.6.3 is an option if you really prefer to manage apps within iTunes.

tt2

centerice wrote:

From linked Apple article above.

"The new iTunes focuses on music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and audiobooks. Apps for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch are now exclusively available in the new App Store for iOS. And the new App Store makes it easy to get, update, and redownload apps—all without a Mac or PC."

All over WiFi that are about as secure as leaving my car windows

open and keys in the ignition at an airport when I go away for a week.

iwaddo wrote:

So presumably now is the time to remove 16Gb of data from the mobile apps folder on my hd, I'm surprised Apple did not delete this data unless of course sync will still copy apps from my iPhone or iPad to my local disk which I doubt very much.

I have no idea why Apple left it in place. If you read Apples info it explains that you can still drag apps from Finder to a device https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201593

Basically iTunes can still copy apps to iOS but Apple removed the old UI to manage it all.

I suspect that iTunes also backs up new apps to that location, so in theory you could revert apps if you have an old copy (e.g. from Time Machine). I don't have iTunes 12.7 to test that theory - update an app on iOS & then sync to iTunes to see if it updates the copy on the Mac.

peterfromthurgoona wrote:

...The question now is where does that [deleted] app go to? complete delete from the phone? if so, how do i retrieve it back on to the phone if I decide later that I want it.

I have found the collection of iOS apps on my computer [Music>iTunes>Mobile Applications] but of course that lists only the apps which I have or deleted prior to 12.7. And in any case I can not see how to reinstall any of those.

Where do I look to seek new iOS apps?

Deleted apps are removed from your device to free up memory. They can be restored from your purchase history in the App Store on your device. See Redownload music, movies, TV shows, apps, and books from the iTunes Store, iBooks Store, and App Store - Apple Support.

You can drag and drop apps from your computer to the device where it appears in the sidebar in iTunes.

New apps are obtained using the App Store on the device.

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I sympathise with your position, look at any of Apples 'bad' decisions in the past & you will see that they take a long time to undo their mistakes, especially ones that are software based.

I'd suggest you look at restoring the older iTunes ASAP (probably from a backup). You will also need to restore the older iTunes Library as the database that references all your files can change (iTunes updates normally create a backup of the old version). Restoring gets more difficult as time passes so reverting should be a priority if you are sure you need the old features.

@busterbird, hold down on the apps & then drag the icons to rearrange How to Rearrange Apps and Folders on the iPhone. It can be slow & cumbersome but better than nothing.

Since the introduction of app thinning with iOS 9 two years ago apps in general haven't transferred from devices into iTunes, although there may be some exceptions involving older apps that haven't embraced app thinning. Many people will have had collections of apps in their libraries that they have been updating in parallel to the ones on their devices. A device backup contains the user's data, the private data for each app, the list of installed apps and the layout information for the screens. The apps themselves are not included in the backup, nor have they generally been transferred from device into library since iOS 9. When a restore takes place in 12.6.2.20 or earlier any app that wasn't in the local machine would have been fetched from the app store over Wi-Fi, in the same way that if would if you were restoring a backup up from iCloud. iTunes 12.7 will no longer look for locally stored copies of apps but will go straight to the source, always getting the most recent version.

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the 2 features I used most were the app stores and iTunes U- these are the two features apparently abolished by the update -- and it makes iTunes essentially useless to me. I would be happy with a Mac app that I could use to organize IOS apps, but I am not aware of one.

Hi Joseph, Im pretty irritated too! 😮 Thanks for the link to provide feedback I will be providing them some! I was ticked to find that all my 32 bit apps I had stored in iTunes were gone. As well as the ability to shop for apps within iTunes, dumb move. I did find that you can still do file transfer to apps via iTunes, when iOS device is plugged in. Thats something at least. Considering reverting back to older iTunes version from backup myself.

So.. it appears from the article that Apple has eliminated the ability to shop or purchase IOS apps from a computer.

Also, for those people who have mulitple IOS devices, seems like 12.7 have also lost our ability to centrally manage our apps.

is this what everyone else is seeing as well??

You're quite right, however it does make the process of downgrading much easier. I've tested in both Mac and Windows. For Windows you need to uninstall the current version of iTunes, and perhaps Apple Software Update to avoid prompts to upgrade in future. In both cases you also need to manually restore the pre-iTunes 12.7 version of your library in a manner such as is given in Empty/corrupt iTunes library after upgrade/crash.

See Deploy apps in a business environment with iTunes - Apple Support for the original documentation on this release.

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This ***** - Apple used to be a place to back up the groupings on the device. This new release takes that away and the App store just stores the purchased apps and not the grouping. A bit of notification would have been nice for those of us that had auto update on. I'll have to restore a computer backup now to get the last iTunes app that stored this and turn off auto update. Bad APPLE :-(

Changes in the new iTunes - Apple Support

Looks like Apple is pushing for more iOS interaction than computer interaction.

Svenborg wrote:

This is not a viable change. I need the desktop feature to be able to easily manage my app folders. I have two iPhones and an iPad. By having to do all the management on each individual device is too cumbersome. It is also too difficult to search the App store only on my device and not on the desktop. As far as I am concerned, iTunes 12.7 is broken and needs to be fixed.

Submit your feedback to Apple here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

I disagree with Drew that this is a mistake. People have been complaining for years that iTunes has become bloated and moved away from being a music playing/organizing app. Many people see this as a move in the right direction. Also, it has been apparent that Apple is doing everything they can to decouple iPhones from direct connections to computers. You may not agree with Apple's decision but, only time will tell if they decide to change their minds.