new iTunes no app s in drop down in iTunes

Management of apps, books, and tones has been removed from iTunes 12.7. See Changes in the new iTunes - Apple Support for details. The intention is clearly that management of these generally takes place on the device.

See the Manually add items from your computer section of Manually manage content on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using iTunes - Apple Support for the control that remains. This can be used to copy apps (including apps that have been withdrawn from the store), ePubs, iBooks, PDFs, and tones from your computer to your device. The File Sharing feature for copying data between apps and the computer is still there. You can also use iCloud Drive, or Dropbox to move content to and from the device.

A long time criticism of iTunes, at least from some quarters, is that has been that it has become bloated. Perhaps this is an attempt to address that. I let both my iOS devices update automatically when there is an updated app, and I'm not interested in hanging on to old apps that a developer has withdrawn, nor do I need to rearrange my apps often, so while the change is drastic, I don't think it really affects me much. I'm more irritated by the changes to iTunes U, and iBooks in iTunes for Windows.

See Deploy apps in a business environment with iTunes - Apple Support for access to iTunes 12.6.3 if you want to revert to a build with app management features. Windows users need to uninstall the current copy of the iTunes application first. See Empty/corrupt iTunes library after upgrade/crash for steps to revert to a pre-iTunes 12.7 version of your iTunes database.

I haven't had a chance to test this new version for updating apps myself, but one user has suggested that the updates are still downloaded over Wi-Fi. 😕

tt2

As given:

See Deploy apps in a business environment with iTunes - Apple Support for access to iTunes 12.6.3 if you want to revert to a build with app management features. Windows users need to uninstall the current copy of the iTunes application first. See Empty/corrupt iTunes library after upgrade/crash for steps to revert to a pre-iTunes 12.7 version of your iTunes database.

tt2

Please see Changes in the new iTunes - Apple Support. Which states all the changes to iTunes.

Yes, you need to update on each device. You can turn on automatic downloads so when you buy a new app it'll also download to the other device (but it well still count as two downloads). Hope you have a good internet connection.

With them removing apps tab from Itunes, it just suxs. I prefer to do my updates in Itunes then having doing them in the app store on the device, at least with Itunes I can see what needs updating and then when I plug in my devices it updates them without me having to download the same app multiply times for multiply devices. Thanks Apple for making me use up more data on my data limited connection by downloading the same app multiply time.

I have the 1st generation Ipad and it doesn't allow me to update apps directly on the Ipad because it will never connect to the store so I need to update the apps through ITunes but now with the new update I can't. Is there still someway to do this?

Do you have multiple devices to manage or just one? With a single device updating directly on the device will be more efficient than using iTunes. Otherwise it probably makes sense to go to 12.6.3, assuming it does actually push updated apps out to the device when you sync. Thankfully no download limit on my UK ADSL service.

tt2

So just to confirm, each of my IOS devices has to download all the updates separately - is that correct? I keep reading about a "..." on iTunes but I don't see it anywhere. Thanks in advance.

Yes TT2 u can still download them over Wi-Fi, but down in Australia we still have download caps on our home internet too