Reorganizing My Apps Again - How to Reinstall Apps You Removed

Last week, I painstakingly went through my apps on my iPhone and iPad, eliminating those apps that I don't use much.  I took on this task as my iPad was taking a month to sync more or less.  Ok, less but it seemed to take a month.   I had little luck in really accomplishing a fast sync, so I resorted to the Restore as new device.  This allowed me to resync  and cleanup my apps on the iPad.

I continued to add new apps to my iTunes library, but before I sync to my iPad, I sync them to my iPhone and then test them to see if they are something that I might also want to have on the iPad.  This was going very well, until the iPhone started bogging down with a sync as well.

So this morning I decided that it may be possible that the 3000+ apps listed in my iTunes (but not all installed) might be bogging down the syncing process for my devices.  I went through the list of apps in the iTunes App Window, selecting apps that I really don't sync but might like to look at again to do a review or to use with the new grandson in the toddler stages.  I selected the apps I wanted to 'Remove' and selected to 'keep the files'.  These files (the .ipa files) are removed from the Apps window in iTunes, but remain in the mobible applications folder on my Mac.   Directory for Mac: username>Music>iTunes>Mobile Applications

Now, you may wonder if the .ipa files stays in the folder, but doesn't show up in the Apps Window of iTunes, how do you reinstall these apps at a future time?  Well, you find the app that you wish to reinstall and drag and drop it into the Apps Window of iTunes.

This removal of apps that I am not currently using, but may wish to use in the future or not, makes for a more manageable list to sync to my devices.  Whether it will speed up my sync process on the two devices, that is yet to be determined.  I am presently syncing my iPhone and it does seem to be running faster, not to the speeds I would like, but then again it is removing a lot of apps from the device in Step 4 of 5 of the sync.   It is also syncing some new apps that I downloaded this morning to test.

My iPad has been syncing very fast since I quit adding apps and narrowed the number of apps to only a few iPad and iPhone favorites.  I did manage to fill all the available pages on the iPad with my favorites along with about a dozen extras that I have to use Spotlight to access in order to run them.

I must say that now that the sync is finished for my iPhone, that it did sync in a reasonable amount of time, in fact in less than 45 minutes.  I suspect that the next sync will be even faster.

To further test my sync, I have added 11 new apps and am resyncing.  The time to sync these new apps after the fresh sync minutes before is a total time of only 6 minutes.  Back to a reasonable amount of sync time without having to Restore the iPhone, which would have caused me to have to resync contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and set up email and settings again. Tweet