Tips: Bring back iOS app management to the Mac with iMazing 2.5.1

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 30
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,328member
    Thanks for the great tip. I agree that iTunes is bloated but Apple's heavy handed way of "fixing" it makes little sense. If you went to your doctor and he told you that you needed to lose some weight, and then proceeded to cut off one of your legs - how would you feel? 
    baconstang
  • Reply 22 of 30
    welshdogwelshdog Posts: 1,897member
    zoetmb said:
    The disadvantage of the old feature was that if one primarily updated apps on the iPhone, when you synched, it took forever to update the apps on the Mac.   

    With Google Fiber and a 2017 MBP app updating was very fast - even when there were like 40 apps to update.


  • Reply 23 of 30
    I'll tell you one thing that's not going away any time soon...iTunes 12.6 on my iMac.
    EVERYONE uses apps and needs to manage them.  
    I never use podcasts or books, yet that crap is still cluttering up my iTunes.
    AFAIK, it'll go away if you get an iPhone X.
    Not if you get iTunes 12.6.3!
    edited November 2017
  • Reply 24 of 30
    rs0212 said:
    I'll tell you one thing that's not going away any time soon...iTunes 12.6 on my iMac.
    EVERYONE uses apps and needs to manage them.  
    I never use podcasts or books, yet that crap is still cluttering up my iTunes.
    AFAIK, it'll go away if you get an iPhone X.
    https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208079
    Yeah, familiar, and we published a story about it. However, if you go through the normal upgrade channels, you can't get it. And, it's a process to downgrade from 12.7 if you already have.
    Thankfully, I stuck with 12.6.2 until I heard about 12.6.3.
  • Reply 25 of 30
    felix01felix01 Posts: 294member
    Looks like Apple has already mage the info available without having to resort to a third-party solution.

    https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/08/view-app-store-and-itunes-purchase-history-on-ios/
  • Reply 26 of 30
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    felix01 said:
    Looks like Apple has already mage the info available without having to resort to a third-party solution.

    https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/08/view-app-store-and-itunes-purchase-history-on-ios/
    This is not really related. Being able to see your purchase history on iOS doesn't help you manage iOS apps on macOS. The latter is what Apple removed from iTunes and what iMazing has partially restored.
  • Reply 27 of 30
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,328member
    A word of warning about iMazing; after I installed the trial version it caused my Time Machine backups to Fail. Trying to recover now by uninstalling iMazing. Looking at the Disk Utility it looks like iMazing very rudely created a partition on one of my Mac drives without warning me or giving me a choice about which volume to use. Not cool at all.

    Even though Apple really pissed me off with their brute force change to iTunes I'm not so sure I want to trust my Mac(s) to a third party low level utility that can break essential Mac functions like Time Machine. Not to beat a dead horse but the only reason I was using iTunes for device app management is because I have crappy internet connectivity. Since the big change I have to download every app update on every single device I own rather than downloading it once on my Mac and then pushing it out to devices. If the Content Cacheing in macOS 10.13 actually worked as advertised things would be better. But from what I can tell, it does not appear to even work or perhaps every device type-iOS version combination is now pulling different versions from the App Store. I still believe Apple's motivation for pulling the app management from iTunes has nothing to do with de-bloating iTunes but everything to with app and app update image fragmentation due to the growing disparity in function capabilities between devices that will only increase as new devices show up with unique new features. This is already apparent with iOS updates which have unique images for every device. While it makes updates somewhat easier to install, if you don't have a problem with 1.5 GB sized downloads, it largely negates the benefits of any content/download cacheing schemes - unless you have multiples of the same exact device.

    Like I've said before the Apple testers live in a magical little world that is very different than many of their customers. They probably have connections to the App Store and iCloud that are at least 10X faster than what most of their customers experience. Things like having to download five slightly different different gigabyte sized images once a week that are no big deal for them, but are really big deals for some of us. 
  • Reply 28 of 30
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,858administrator
    dewme said:
    A word of warning about iMazing; after I installed the trial version it caused my Time Machine backups to Fail. Trying to recover now by uninstalling iMazing. Looking at the Disk Utility it looks like iMazing very rudely created a partition on one of my Mac drives without warning me or giving me a choice about which volume to use. Not cool at all.

    Even though Apple really pissed me off with their brute force change to iTunes I'm not so sure I want to trust my Mac(s) to a third party low level utility that can break essential Mac functions like Time Machine. Not to beat a dead horse but the only reason I was using iTunes for device app management is because I have crappy internet connectivity. Since the big change I have to download every app update on every single device I own rather than downloading it once on my Mac and then pushing it out to devices. If the Content Cacheing in macOS 10.13 actually worked as advertised things would be better. But from what I can tell, it does not appear to even work or perhaps every device type-iOS version combination is now pulling different versions from the App Store. I still believe Apple's motivation for pulling the app management from iTunes has nothing to do with de-bloating iTunes but everything to with app and app update image fragmentation due to the growing disparity in function capabilities between devices that will only increase as new devices show up with unique new features. This is already apparent with iOS updates which have unique images for every device. While it makes updates somewhat easier to install, if you don't have a problem with 1.5 GB sized downloads, it largely negates the benefits of any content/download cacheing schemes - unless you have multiples of the same exact device.

    Like I've said before the Apple testers live in a magical little world that is very different than many of their customers. They probably have connections to the App Store and iCloud that are at least 10X faster than what most of their customers experience. Things like having to download five slightly different different gigabyte sized images once a week that are no big deal for them, but are really big deals for some of us. 
    You may have a different issue. No issues with Time Machine here after installation.
  • Reply 29 of 30
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,328member
    You may have a different issue. No issues with Time Machine here after installation.
    Could be. The last successful Time Machine backup is directly correlated the a date-time stamp corresponding to the installation of iMazing. Correlation does not imply causation but the sudden appearance of a new disk partition labeled as iMazing backup or something similar in Disk Utility is additional evidence that something happened coincidental with the iMazing install and initialization.

    I removed the iMazing in accordance with their FAQ instructions but the Time Machine backup will still not complete. I ran First Aid on all of my volumes and everything looks okay so I think something got messed up in the existing Time Machine image file that will not allow it to chain in the next incremental backup that Time Machine is trying to add to the Time Machine backup history. I do know that iMazing relies upon device backups for much of its functionality since iOS devices and their data are locked down. The iMazing app isn’t really reading some of the data it presents directly from the devices, it’s gleaning it from backup images. But this is different than Time Machine backups so the relationship between Time Machine and iMazing is a mystery to me. I did report the problem to the iMazing support people.

    The online reviews of iMazing are heavily dominated by 5-star ratings with only a few 1-2 star hits, so it is obviously a product that many people find quite useful. But it is similar to VMware Fusion/Parallels with its heavy dependence on what Apple decides to do with OS changes. I imagine you’ll have to update iMazing every time iOS has a major version update. I do hope that iMazing is relying solely on public APIs to perform its functionality. But I’d still be happier if Apple provided a dedicated device management application of their own (for end users) and relegated iTunes solely to music, as they’ve already done on iOS. Same for iBooks. Video should likewise be managed through a TV type app, again, as they’ve done for iOS.  
    edited November 2017
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