Reinstalling old apps
Now that iTunes on the Mac no longer stores and manages iOS apps, how can I downgrade to an older version of an iOS app?
[ TIM FUSSELL ]
Howard Oakley replies: iTunes 12.7 and later can’t download iOS apps or manage those that are installed on iOS devices. Further complicating matters, for a while, iTunes has not synced apps downloaded on iOS devices back to the Mac; with iOS 9, Apple introduced a set of techniques called ‘app thinning’ to save bandwidth and storage by downloading only what’s necessary for the device you’re using, which would prevent you transferring it, say, from an iPad to a Mac and then an iPhone.
However, you may still have copies of much older versions of iOS apps available on your Mac from before that time, when you were using an older version of iTunes.
Previous versions of iTunes stored copies of iOS apps under Mobile Applications within iTunes’ library folder. If you can’t find any there, have a browse through your Time Machine
backups and you might find some. These will have the .ipa file extension.
Installing those apps from your Mac onto an iOS device may seem impossible now that your iTunes library has no Apps category. However, even the latest iTunes can install an .ipa file on a connected iOS device.
In Finder, drag and drop the .ipa file for the app you want to reinstall onto your device’s icon in iTunes’ left pane. The biggest snag with this is that the only apps you can do this with are those downloaded directly to your Mac before iOS 11 was released last September. However, some won’t be 64-bit and so will be incompatible with iOS 11, or they may have other compatibility issues with it.
Apple still provides iTunes 12.6.3, which can manage iOS apps, at bit.ly/itunes1263