iTunes 12.7

AnnieGetYourMac wrote:

Agreed. I have always hated searching the app store on one of my is devices. And now the thought of restoring to a phone - all those apps individually - is just too much. This is insanity!

You don't have to do anything individually. Connect device to iTunes, select backup to restore, click restore, and allow iTunes to do the job. App packages are pulled directly from the iTunes Store.

tt2

If I were to write a letter to Mr Tim Cook, below are some of the things that I would put into it.....

People bought into the Apple eco system because their products are not only slick and beautiful but also easy to use, without sacrificing privacy, however this 12.7 iTunes update is far from what we normally expect of an Apple product, it may be considered beautiful by some, but it is not as easy to operate as we have come to expect from Apple.

Why the update? Lord only knows! Maybe it does have the safety that one would expect, maybe from the developers point of view it fits very nicely into Apple’s eco system, but I can tell you, it is far from easy! It may fit into Apple’s eco system, but it does not fit into ours!!

Yes there are work arounds, but why, this late in the game, do we need work arounds?

Why, after paying so much money for this kind of product, this level of technology , do we need work arounds?

Yes people say we can still drag and drop, using iTunes,but one has to know specifically where and how, who knows, how long that will be supported though, given the desire to have everything in the Cloud!

Yes comments were made that we should now use, or need to only use our devices to manage our apps or data, and maybe for some people that is a good way to go, but we have to remember that not everyone works in the same way....

We also have to remember that today’s population is getting older,

I belong to the baby boomer generation, and believe me, there are a lot of us, and so on an iPhone or iPad, even though we may use them for media consumption, using them to manage data is another thing altogether, using them to manage our data is not the way we want to go!

I can tell you that backing up and managing our data on a computer is much easier for most of us... given the size screen etc.....

( Just so you know, most of the time, I do not use my phone to browse the App Store for new apps, I use iTunes through a Computer! )

Not to mentioned that not all of us have unlimited internet!

So imagine if a person has hundreds of apps that he has purchased from Apple’s store? I am sure that some have more!

What if this person has to set up a new phone or iPad?

Do you see this person using his bandwidth to do this? Syncing from the App Store all his purchases? I think not!

So having your apps managed on a Computer is the easier not to mention, faster way to go Mr Cook...

Not to mention, that we do not always need all our apps at the same time, so for some of us, we may want to leave on our computer, the ones we don’t need, until we do,

Now you may say that the iPad takes care of that, that today you can offload all of your unused apps to the Cloud until you need them.. but if this app becomes unavailable in the App Store sometime in the future? What then?

According to Apple we will not be able to download them ever again!! So where do you see the value in that? Especially if you have paid good money for these apps?

No, like many, having them on your own computer, managing them yourself seems to be the better way to go!! At least the safer way to go, by far!!

I personally have apps that are still compatible with iOS 11 but are now not on the App Store, so where will that leave me, if I use the update 12.7 for iTunes?

How disappointing and sad, especially from a company that prides itself on making things easier for us consumers!

Why not give us the choice to switch back and forth, to be able to go one way or another?

That way everyone will be satisfied!!

Please reconsider this update!!

Thanks in advance......

Yep, this is part of what I would say, if I had the chance...

My guess is that he knows where he would write, but has concluded (as have I) that the "Infinite Loop" is next to a black hole into which any form of feedback or criticism of Apple is immediately sucked into... never to be seen or understood, much less replied to. So he posts it here... on discussions.apple.com... where I am sure that Apple has absolutely no means to monitor this or any other social networking system for commentary that is critical of their products or services. So Apple knows about it. They just don't give a crap what we think. They know what is right and you can suck it if you don't like it.

Mark Hunnibell wrote:

My guess is that he knows where he would write, but has concluded (as have I) that the "Infinite Loop" is next to a black hole into which any form of feedback or criticism of Apple is immediately sucked into... never to be seen or understood, much less replied to. So he posts it here... on discussions.apple.com... where I am sure that Apple has absolutely no means to monitor this or any other social networking system for commentary that is critical of their products or services. So Apple knows about it.

No on from Apple reads the posts here unless 1) they are reported to the Hosts for violations of the Terms of Use or 2) an engineer has been tasked with getting examples of a specific problem. You can be assured that they didn't read that.

Feedback given in the proper channels does get read. I realize it's unsatisfying not to receive an answer as one might here. However, it would seem to me that getting your point to Apple is really more important.

http://www.apple/com/feedback

Interesting. I appreciate your response. That would be at least a partial relief. Are you saying that if I've made changes to my apps (added, deleted,moved) since changing to 12.7, that 12.7 is backing up those changes and would restore those changes to a new phone? If so, can you direct me to where I might see proof of that in a directory on my Mac? Currently, I know of only one location - in my users/.../iTunes/Mobile Applications folder and my folder's list of apps only has the latest date of a month ago - the last time I backed up with iTunes 12.6. It doesn't reflect any dates of backups I've done with 12.7. I believe in your confidence, TT2. But I would also like to see proof with my own eyes. Could you please tell me the where the the file is that would show me, if not the apps, perhaps a snapshot of all the apps and their organization as of a backup with 12.7?

This would be a relief, if true, as I worry about all the many circumstances in which my phone may need to be restored completely.

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.

tt2

I own 5 Nano's , two iPhones, an iTouch, two iPADs, a Mac Pro and an iMac 27. All my iOS devices are backed up on the Mac Pro.

Since their new "iTunes 12.7" was a disaster for me, I went back in Time Machine and simply installed my backup from 10 SEP so I am back to iTunes 12.6 and problem solved!

So I will just keep using 12.6 and will, of course, NOT update my devices to iOS 11 since that also seems to be a disaster.

<Edited by Host>

I have good broadband, but I think Apple has not thought this through. Phones with big memory are likely to need a local copy of apps. There has to be some way to manage devices, not just to consume media.

Goldwah wrote:

The problem is music has tiny bandwidth an app can br hundreds of mb. I only get 30gb a month and updates to 6 linked devices eats my bandwid

The problem is that unless the 6 devices are identical each app will have a different version for each device due to app thinning. So you will still need to download as many copies as you have different types of devices.

Yes but i get to choose if it happens on cheaper bandwidth. Currently im often being asked to do it on a cellular hotspot, wheteas normally the apps were set to auto update in itunes and wifi sync when i get to my home network.

Most countries dont have cheap or unlimited bandwidth. Cellular data here is $10 a gb on average my plan has an allowance of 28 gb, my home plan has 30gb then shaped to 128kbps.... this is in a first world country not some remote desert

Deleted iTunes and all associated files in library. Then restored to earlier iTunes version from Time Machine . The earlier version would not open, kept getting error that library was created by newer version of iTunes and tried to force me to update.... So deleted the earlier version and just restored to current 12.7. Now I lost all music and files in iTunes that were not purchased from iTunes. What a mess. Will have to manual import content back into iTunes manually from back up. Would not advise people to delete iTunes unless they want to end up with a mess 😟

Hi and thanks,

I was having all kinds of problems with 12.7 (going to black screen upon closing iTunes ) after having restored it, after first deleting it. So made one more attempt to restore to 12.6. from time machine. But checked the library for for any iTunes files. some itl files hanging out from 12.7 were the issue. Back up and running in 12.6 🙂

Idris - Then Apple should give us an app managing app on the Mac. Just because you don't mind the change doesn't mean it doesn't have a major impact on many users. Not only did I lose app control with iTunes 12.7, I lost my videos (which I could recover with a lot of work) and many old podcast episodes (which are gone forever). For most of us, the new iTunes is a major blunder.

Hello to every frustrated Apple customer here. While I was able to revert to an earlier version of iTunes for now, Im finding the AnyTrans desktop application to be an excellent way to manage iOS devices on a desktop. Will probably be my long term solution since iTunes is headed south. Has many features that iTunes never had, such as ability to manage and download entire text messages. Easy to use with slick interface. Im already going to horde any 32 bits apps I may need here. Thanks to Cult of Mac for posting Youtube video highlighting its features. You can try a trial version free.

Download here AnyTrans - Manage All Your Apple iProducts - Official Version

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??