I realized a mistake I have been making with purchasing applications from the iTunes App store and the iPhone. I thought it would work like this:
- Purchase an application from iTunes and it would then sync with the phone – check.
- Check for updates to purchased applications with iTunes and have those updated applications sync to the phone – check.
- Purchase an application using the iPhone and have it sync back to iTunes – check. Well, that’s how I thought it worked once.
At some point iTunes must have stopped asking me if I wanted to transfer purchases from the phone to the computer and I never noticed, so I kept expecting the apps I was downloading using the phone were getting back to the computer. Whenever I would then check for updates to applications that I had read were updated, iTunes would never show that any updates were available, but those same applications would show available updates on the AppStore on the phone. Weird.
Then it hit me, these apps aren’t copying successfully from phone to computer and I started looking around. All I had to do was right click on the iPhone listed under the Devices section of iTunes and select transfer purchases and everything copied to the computer as expected.
Now that I understand that syncing may not transfer purchases I know how to handle this and figured there may be others out there that are seeing the same thing and wondered why things seem out of sync with application updates between iTunes and their iPhone or iPod Touch.