iTunes 12.7 released

[squerble]

As expected, there's a new iTunes release today. An interesting thing is they've got rid of App syncing via iTunes:

If you previously used iTunes to sync apps or ringtones on your iOS device, use the new App Store or Sounds Settings on iOS to redownload them without your Mac.

So now I'm curious what will happen to the local "store" of applications, and how this affects backups. I guess iTunes 12.7 can just take a backup of the app data from the phone, and store that. Then, when you restore a phone from backup, it just downloads the latest version of the app and restores the appdata on top - I believe it couldn't store the app data from apps that weren't downloaded to the Mac in previous versions, meaning that if your local "store" wasn't up to date, it couldn't back up the data for that app.

While this does remove bloat from iTunes (a tiny bit, at least), this is extremely annoying for people like myself who have slow internet connections (I have 2Mb at home), as the 100Mb limit for downloading over cellular data is still there, plus I only have 20GB a month to play with.

 

[squerble]

So what happens if I want to reinstall an app that's no longer on the store?

Apple support article. Check out the last section, "Manually add items from your computer". Tl;dr: you can drag and drop.

 

[squerble]

iTunes hasn’t been restoring apps directly since iOS 9 and the app thinning.

I've just been trying to read up on this. If that's the case, why does my iTunes still download the full versions of the apps to my Mac (as app updates)? Surely that's a good few gigabytes I could be saving on hard drive space?