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Transfer ONE app from device to iTunes?

patent10021

patent10021

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Apr 23, 2004
3,531
810
I don't want to transfer purchases from device to iTunes because that would take forever. Plus I'm going to be cleaning out my phone down to one page of app [dreaming :)].

I know we can transfer single apps from iTunes to device but I'm not interested in that. I just want to transfer 1 or 10 apps manually. Is this even possible? If not, it should be an obvious option.

Do I really need to delete all the apps I don't want on my device first, then transfer all purchase to iTunes? If so that's a big cluster f#ck.

Reason for solution:
I want to do a clean restore to improve performance of device. Therefore I just want to transfer a few apps that have internal data backups like chat app history or financial data etc that is stored in iCloud.

Is it better just to make sure vital app data is backed up in iCloud, do a fresh restore to iOS 11 then re-download those few apps? Sometimes things can get sketchy though and not sync properly between app server and iCloud.

That's why I want to manually transfer a few apps from device to iTunes.

Is is better to rely on iCloud or transfer of apps to iTunes to reliably save app data?

EDIT: from what I've read this is not possible. And even if it were possible, no app data is backed up to iTunes. We need a 3rd party explorers utility for that or just reply on iCloud or App company's server for back up.
 
Last edited:
T

Tech198

Cancelled
Mar 21, 2011
15,915
2,151
iTunes 12.7.0 no longer syncs apps anymore.. Best to re-download the apps u need.

Correct, no app data is backed up, so it it was possible, then u'd need to re-enter credentials again...

You will need to do this when you re-download apps anyway. But i think an encrypted backup to iTunes saves that login info etc.. although i couldn't get it to work.. I have a feeling this doesn't include 3rd party apps.
 
NoBoMac

NoBoMac

Moderator
Staff member
Jul 1, 2014
6,293
5,002
I agree that, for the most part, application data does get backed up. But, there have been some odd ones of the years that for some reason does not backup.

Example: I recently did a erase and restore of my iPhone. For the most part, everything came back via iTunes backup, but my Dropbox app did not save and or restore correctly (documents I downloaded and marked as being available for offline access were not on the device).
 
Last edited:
chrfr

chrfr

macrumors G5
Jul 11, 2009
13,715
7,289
NoBoMac said:
I agree that, for the most part, application data does get backed up. But, there have been some odd ones of the years that for some reason does not backup.

Example: I recently did a erase and restore of my iPhone. For the most part, everything came back via iTunes backup, but my Dropbox add did not save and or restore correctly (documents I downloaded and marked as being available for offline access were not on the device).
Click to expand...
I'd assume then that Dropbox is keeping track of that setting on the server side and that Dropbox doesn't mark that as data that is to be backed up.
 
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