iMazing software now enables downloading of previously purchased iOS apps

https://imazing.com/blog/imazing-2-5-download-apps

From the above blog entry:

To our knowledge, iMazing is the only non-Apple software to enable users to download their purchases from the iOS App Store. We strongly hope that Apple won't block iMazing's app download capabilities: we've done our best to provide tools which many iOS users truly need.

I haven't tried this fantastic idea of iMazing's yet, but frankly I suspect the functionality won't work for long. I expect Apple will indeed block this capability, because Apple doesn't want general users to have an easy way to run older apps, which could be a security risk (iTunes 12.7 removes ability to save .ipa files to PC).

But kudos to iMazing!

iTunes 12.7 removes ability to save .ipa files to PC

In what I imagine is a continuing push toward greater control over the apps running on iOS devices, hopefully in the name of security as opposed to inconvenience to users, Apple has removed the ability to save .ipa files (which correspond to apps) onto one's PC (or Mac, presumably) starting from iTunes 12.7 (Apple removed the App Store from within iTunes). If you value that capability, you will probably not want to upgrade your iTunes software if you still have a pre-12.7 version.

For loading .ipa files onto iOS devices, I have generally switched to using CopyTrans (not iTunes), as I wrote here. However, ever since iOS 9 (per ), the only way to get those .ipa files was through PC iTunes. iOS 9 removed the ability to transfer .ipa files onto a pc from apps already loaded onto an iOS device.

I have periodically had a need or desire to load an earlier version of an app, when some aspect of the current version wasn't working the way I wanted. Less than a month ago I so reverted Opera Mini to the earlier version 14, since the new version (16) forcibly includes a bunch of mass-market web articles, which I don't want. (Reverting conveniently fixed a space-rendering problem when viewing various websites [though notably not Google News], a problem which started perhaps a few months earlier, and which I'm guessing was due to some Opera Mini data corruption on my iPod.)

I don't think Apple is likely to ever reverse this change, so I'll be staying away from iTunes 12.7 and its successors as long as possible.

9/21/17: Apple still provides access to pre-12.7 iTunes installers for Windows (search for "itunes" on https://support.apple.com/), but that could change at any time:

• iTunes 12.1.3 for Windows (32 bit)
• iTunes 12.1.3 for Windows (64-bit)

10/7/17:

• If you deinstall a 12.7 (or later) version of iTunes, and replace it with a pre-12.7 version:
• You may have to sacrifice the data in your My Music\iTunes\iTunes Library.itl file because the earlier version of iTunes may not (probably won't) work with one that has been modified by a 12.7 or later version of iTunes. How much that file's contents matters to you depends on how you use iTunes. You may be less dependent on it if you use third-party software (e.g., CopyTrans, which I wrote about here) to manage iOS device(s).
• You will want to avoid upgrading it when you get apparently periodic prompts to do so from the Apple Software Update software. I don't think there is a setting via which it would automatically upgrade to a newer version without prompting for your approval, but if there is, you will want to disable it. 
• Depending on the model of your iOS device(s) and/or iOS version(s), a certain version (or higher) of iTunes will be needed to manage it. If you had 2 (or more) PCs, you could manage your device with a 12.7 or newer version of iTunes on one PC, and use a pre-12.7 version on a different PC to download .ipa files.

Flixster app

12/29/12: I think that version 5.7.9 (?), which is already an older version, may have been the last one which allowed playing one's locally saved movies without requiring an Internet connection. At least in some newer versions (5.8.0 and 5.8.1, I believe), Flixster started inserting a preliminary screen which advertised a new movie each time you (cold-?) start the app. According to my recollection, without an Internet connection there was no way to bypass that screen, preventing you from proceeding to your locally saved movies.
I no longer have version 5.7.9, but this app doesn't really provide much benefit to me aside from my fewer than half-dozen Ultraviolet movies, so I deleted it. I may reinstall it in the future if I ever want to view any of those movies again on an iOS device (or, perhaps, if I learn that they have dropped the Internet connection requirement to see locally saved movies).

The (free) Flixster app (version 5.7.1) provides assorted information about movies, similar to that provided by IMDB (whose movie still images incidentally seem to load more quickly). I don't watch enough movies to use either of these apps regularly for general movie information, but I found it impossible to resist what eventually totaled 4 free movies from Flixster.

I had previously made both a Flixster and an UltraViolet account. Doing so was necessary in order to access, on an iOS device, the digital download copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, to which I was entitled, having bought the movie discs (Hmm, I think that was also the last movie I saw at the theater). When registering for those accounts, I did not use the e-mail address which I use with my Facebook account. With those accounts, I was able to download the movie over wifi to my iPod and play it in the Flixster app.

For the iPod (and the iPad), Flixster needed at least one (and hopefully only that one) invocation while connected to the Internet to be able, when lacking Internet access and cold-starting the app, to select and play a movie that you own and had previously loaded onto the device. I don't think that that Internet-connected-invocation was needed in previous versions for such usage. In any case, you may wish to start the app at a time when you have wifi each time you upgrade, and confirm this behavior continues in order to be sure you can play movies without wifi.

Each time I started the Flixster app, it dangled the prospect of a free movie, provided that I linked my Flixster account to my Facebook account and created an UltraViolet account. Exactly which movie sometimes changed across a small set of movies when I restarted the process of seeing the potential freebie. It's obviously their prerogative to have that Facebook requirement, but I was reluctant to link up my Facebook account. However, when I was sick recently, I broke down and agreed to link the two accounts, wanting to have more entertainment at my fingertips.

I discovered I had come relatively late to this game, since within Flixster, 40 or so of my Facebook friends appeared as having done that before me. One of those friends had used Flixster so long ago that he was quite surprised when I mentioned his appearance among my "Flixster friends".

Anyway, after I got my free movie, I was surprised to see that Flixster subsequently offered more free movies, one each to:

• Install the Flixster Mobile App into my Facebook account
• Rate 5 movies out of a small set of movies
• Add 10 movies out of a small set of movies to your Want To See list
• Invite friends via SMS (I drew the line here!)

All these subsequent free movies were "surprises". Unlike the first free one, I could not know in advance what they were.

Obviously you are trading your (or your friends'!) data for the additional free movies. A very reasonable data-gathering strategy from Flixster/UltraViolet. While it would of course be possible to randomly select movies for the 2nd and 3rd tasks above, I have the feeling many people wouldn't do that because:

• There is the possibility that your choices will influence the freebie you will get, so you would do yourself no favors by clicking on movies that don't appeal to you.
• Depending on the settings you allowed, your Facebook friends may see some of your movie information, and you may care what they see.
• Social Media (including blogging...) leads people into thinking their contributions are of some value to others, so in some areas you are perhaps more likely to state your true positions. Everybody wants to be a movie reviewer/critic whose opinions are valued, right?

Having watched 3 out of the 4 movies, I have to say that it is quite nice to have this additional access to these downloaded movies. I have poor wifi throughput, so streaming is not a viable choice for me; the movie would typically pause at random times, and the video could be blocky.

The download time for each movie could be a couple of hours (I never tracked the exact duration); I simply downloaded when I wasn't otherwise using my wifi. You must leave the Flixster app running in the foreground (you cannot put the device to sleep) during the entirety of the download, though you can interrupt the download without losing the portion that's already come to your device.

The app retains the downloaded movies from each of my two Flixster accounts, but I can only see the movies for one account at a time, whichever account I'm logged into. That also means that the storage space used by all the movies can only be seen within the app by looking at both accounts in turn. If, at the time that I signed up with Flixster/UltraViolet for the Harry Potter movie, I had known that I would later download free movies via the Flixster app, I would have used my Facebook-linked e-mail account back then, but that's water under the bridge now.

I prefer to store downloaded movies on my PC, which has plenty of hard drive space, and copy selected ones from there to my iPod on an ad hoc basis (which takes only a couple of minutes), deleting them from the iPod afterward in order to save space there. To my knowledge, this is not possible through Flixster/Ultraviolet, but it is possible through iTunes. So it seems Flixster/UltraViolet have successfully sold me on the idea of buying digital movies...from Apple through iTunes, at least if the prices are comparable. Indeed, I bought my first iTunes movie shortly after this Flixster/UltraViolet experience (It was Standard Definition, and iTunes claimed it would take 3 hours to download -- I went to sleep.).

Still, Without convenient access to your pc (I use lowercase pc to mean PC or Mac) to access previously downloaded iTunes movies, Flixster/UltraViolet has rather more appeal and iTunes are likely pretty comparable. Your entire UltraViolet and iTunes movie libraries would likely be available to you at any time via wifi download, which could be great for travelers. There might, however, be international licensing restrictions on such downloading.

French pop songs, iTunes, and iPod speaker limitations

I recently saw the movie Hugo, at the end of which is a very nice French song called Cœur Volant by the new-to-me French singer Zaz. I found that she released an eponymous (man, I never thought I'd ever use that word) album in 2010, which was for sale on iTunes.

Gone are the days when you had to buy an entire album to find out which songs you like. I listened to snippets of each track on iTunes, targeting two that seemed to my taste (Le long de la route, La fée). Then I was fortunate enough to borrow both the Hugo and Zaz CDs from the library, and listened to them on two different boomboxes, discovering another Zaz track that I liked (Port Coton). So iTunes snippets aren't necessarily enough to find all the tracks you'd like.

I bought Cœur Volant from Hugo, plus the 3 Zaz tracks, from iTunes, and returned the CD. Zaz also released her own version of Cœur Volant, but PC iTunes showed that that shorter version had been purchased far less often than the longer version from the Hugo movie, whose additional time is probably all instrumental.

One thing that surprised me was that when listening to Port Coton at a normal volume on a boombox, I couldn't hear the guitar(?) squeaking sound that precedes and follows her singing. That squeaking is annoyingly audible when listening to the song on an iPod speaker, which admittedly is far from a superb audio experience, but is still good enough for me most of the time.

As a language exercise, I typed out all the words I could make out while listening to Port Coton, then compared them with the actual lyrics. Clearly I have more work to do, but I like to think I've improved from 10 or so years ago. Back then I went to an all-day advanced French course, and was horribly, disappointingly inaccurate while filling in just the last word(!) of several lines in French singer Pauline Ester's Une Fenêtre ouverte song, which the instructor played several times for us. That's from a decent album (Le Monde est fou), but if I was introduced to it today I probably would similarly only buy several of its tracks. Hmm, maybe not -- one of the songs I like, La mer, isn't available on iTunes, even if my other favorites from that album are. Digital downloads don't necessarily completely mirror CD material.

Moving on to the same language exercise with La fée....


2/13/15: Well, I guess due to life realities I'll never get around to finishing the above language exercises, but I did buy Zaz's newer (though not newest) album Recto Verso, and I like it better than her debut album. Check it out!

iPod: from 3rd to 4th generation under iOS 5.0.1

A while back, my 3rd generation iPod crashed so hard under iOS 4.3.5 that it "lost its mind". I used PC iTunes 10.5.0.142 to load iOS 5.0.1 onto its wiped-clean "mind", but its longstanding port hardware problem soon thereafter became so serious that I could no longer charge it without precariously holding the cable just right (for the entire charging period, something I wasn't about to do).

I got a 4th generation iPod which was initially at iOS 4.3.3, and got errors when trying to reload it with iOS 5.0.1. The Apple error message's first recommendation was to update PC iTunes, which I did, bringing it to 10.5.1. It seems logical enough that Apple might require the latest version of iTunes for such operations. I was then able to bring the iPod up to iOS 5.0.1.

In PC iTunes, I then attempted to Restore from Backup. There were two backups, one from my initial activation of the 4th generation device (and therefore not useful), and another of the 3rd generation one from 6 days earlier. Attempts to restore from the second (chronologically earlier) backup failed, reporting that the backup session failed.

More recently I had been doing backups to iCloud, and two of those backups were there. The first had virtually no data from my activation of the new iPod minutes earlier and was therefore not of interest. The earlier one was from 2 days earlier (from the 3rd generation iPod), and I began restoring from that. Ah, the beauty of the iOS 5 backup over WiFi, which takes place when you are charging at an outlet. You always have to charge; backup is a perfect thing to occur alongside.

The iPod reported that some items could not be downloaded, but that I could restore them if I had them on my (PC) iTunes by doing a sync operation. The following apps were not restored from the iCloud backup because they were no longer available in the App Store (Could there be any other reason why an app wouldn't have been restored?), but I still had them in my PC iTunes:

• CED
• Go To There
• InstaPaper Free

My outgoing 3rd generation iPod still had some battery charge (I had been conserving the remaining charge with Airplane Mode, turning it off, turning the brightness down all the way), so I could visually compare if any other apps were missing after the PC iTunes sync.

PC iTunes lists the device, presumably purely cosmetically, as a 3rd generation iPod.

I did a certain amount of work resetting app configurations and restoring data from servers associated with the apps.

Assorted impressions of the 4th generation iPod:

• Great to have cameras. I had recently been at the scene of an accident with my camera-less 3rd generation iPod, and stayed as one of the witnesses for the police who eventually came. If I had had this back then, I would have snapped pictures which would clearly have shown the policeman that the errant driver was in the wrong lane at the time of the accident. Fortunately I believe enough witnesses corroborated that anyway. You can also use the front-facing camera to use the iPod as a pseudo-mirror.
• The addition of a microphone changed (downgraded) what Apple included as earphones (my blog entry).
• The power button was moved to a more awkward position away from the top edge, making turning it on/off and taking screenshots (press power button + home button) clumsier. Maybe the new placement was needed because of the cameras or other hardware issues.
• Volume buttons were similarly moved to a more awkward position away from the side edge.
• The 3rd generation iPod's screen always looked great to me, but the Retina display of the 4th generation iPod is even sharper. My Opera Mini browser's saved Speed Dial images looked worse than they had on the old iPod, but simply recreating them fixed that. I had the initial impression that I needed the screen brightness to be slightly higher for the new iPod than for the old, but I'm no longer sure about that.

The following links from a Google search for "restore from icloud" were of the most use to me:

http://gigaom.com/apple/ios-101-set-up-and-restore-from-icloud-backup/
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4859
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1766
http://heresthethingblog.com/2011/10/18/restore-iphone-ipad-icloud-backup/
http://heresthethingblog.com/2011/07/21/wipe-iphone-android-phone/

Update an app but retain option to revert to older version

Data you save for an app might not be able to be restored (it really depends on how the app stores data) if you restore the app using this technique.  If that data is valuable enough, you may be obliged to never revert from the update of such an app.  Your need to continue using your already-saved data may force you to accept any changes in behavior of an app's new version, even if you could revert the app itself.

The following steps using PC iTunes over USB cable enabled me to revert to Opera Mini browser 6.0.1 after a quick, disappointing test of 6.5.1 on an iPad running iOS 5.0.1, and should work the same way on an iPod.

The following presumes the iOS device is normally using iCloud backup, and also that Opera Link was previously used to save bookmarks and Speed Dial targets.  Other apps may have other customization steps akin to Opera Link.

• Disable backup to iCloud on device (I overlooked this precautionary step in my test).
• Disable backup to iCloud on device within PC iTunes (if needed).
• Backup device via USB cable to PC iTunes.
• Update app on iOS device over wireless.
• Test updated app on iOS device.
  12/7/11:  If you are going to test the app for an extended time, DO NOT leave the app on the device when syncing the device with PC iTunes before completing testing, because the sync will wipe out your old version of the app in PC iTunes.  If you are saving any data with the new version of the app, you're going to have to give it all up should you need to delete the app for this scenario.  I overlooked this when I was testing 6.5.1 on my iPod, so I lost my 6.0.1 version in PC iTunes, but fortunately 6.5.1 turned out to be a superior replacement.
• If you prefer the older version of your app, delete the updated app from iOS device, then manually copy the older version back to the iOS device within PC iTunes.
• Use Opera Link to restore bookmarks and Speed Dial targets (the latter will get up-to-date page images).
• Disable Opera Link (unless you normally keep it enabled).
• Move the (restored) Opera Mini icon to your desired Home Screen location.
• Re-enable backup to iCloud on device.
• Re-enable backup to iCloud on device within PC iTunes if needed.

Remember that PC iTunes can save (specific versions of) apps even if they later get removed from the App Store.  Some apps are removed because they are replaced by a newer version, and some get totally removed (often enough without explanation).  I haven't tested, but something like the above likely works from iCloud backup, except perhaps for apps removed from the App Store.

6/25/12: The following (or something close to it) is behavior I observed a while back during testing, which is quite logical but caught me by surprise:
If you have multiple iOS devices syncing with the same PC's iTunes, be careful with any app which is a Universal Binary (same app runs on both iPod/iPhone and iPad size screens, making full usage of the two respective screen sizes) which you use on all devices. If you update it on one device and sync that device with the PC's iTunes, the other device(s) will also get that app updated to the newer version when it syncs with that PC's iTunes.

You mean I can play music on my iPod?

I'm one of those people who doesn't have a great need for new music.  I've been largely content with my CD collection for years, which I ripped to my PC and also transferred to my Zune, a gift from a relative who had no need for it. The only artist whose works I almost always buy is Jackson Browne, and it's only as I prepared this blog entry that I learned from this jackson browne discography, maintained by another fan, that I've missed two(!) albums since 2008.

My iPod's port hardware is unreliable to the point of the iPod generally not showing up within my PC's iTunes after connecting iPod and PC with the USB cord. Since that type of connection is how I would copy my music collection to my iPod, I had expected not to put any music on the iPod.

However, after opening the Music app ("You have no songs", or something like that), I was guided by Apple's savvy to the iTunes app. I had previously put the iTunes app into an "Entertainment" group, which I had largely forgotten about given my other (happy) use of the iPod.

In iPod iTunes, I downloaded the 4 free songs currently being promoted. I subsequently discovered that I wouldn't be able to delete them from the iPod since I lack access (reliable access, in any case) to my iPod though my PC's iTunes. Okay, so no more wild downloading of free songs -- who needs additional clutter?
(8/1/11: With some cable fiddling I got my iPod to be recognized by my PC's iTunes, after which a second pair of hands helped me delete those songs. If I released my awkward hold on the cable, my iPod would immediately disappear from within my PC's iTunes. Right before that, I was also finally able to update my iOS to 4.3.5 from 4.2.1 using the same type of cable fiddling.)

However, podcasts can be deleted directly from the iPod, and that is a whole 'nother thing (and future blog entry).