Flaw in iOS reinstall from the cloud feature

A new feature was enabled in the app store recently and at first sight it seemed quite useful, but it has an irritating flaw. Here’s how it should work: If you have multiple iOS devices, such as an iPhone and an iPad, you might purchase an app, download it and install it from the App Store on one device and wish it was also on the other device. Now you can easily do this without having to go through the App Store and purchase it all over again. All the apps you have purchased are listed in App Store Updates and you can re-download and re-install any of them with a few taps of the screen.

On the iPhone for example, you go to the App Store, tap Updates at the bottom of the screen, and tap Purchased. On the iPhone you can then select either All or Not on this iPhone. All the apps you have purchased are listed and there’s a little cloud icon next to each one. Tap it and you can download and install the app.

This sounds fine in theory, but the snag is that free apps are technically purchases and they are recorded as purchases against your iTunes user account, even though you never paid anything for them. So here’s the flaw: Every app you ever downloaded gets listed! There are thousands of free apps in the App Store and if you like trying them you will have clocked up a large number of (free) purchases.

Some apps are brilliant of course, but some are not and you might quickly delete them after trying them. They sound interesting in the App Store blurb, but when you try them they turn out to be boring, not what you thought it was, or isn’t appealing for some other reason. All the apps you ever download and rejected are listed on your device for re-installation. They get in the way of the apps you are interested in. You might have tried hundreds of apps if you have had your phone for some time and all the apps you rejected for whatever reason are listed.

This feature hasn’t been thought through properly. It can be fixed though and one thing that could be done is to filter out free apps. There is no need for them to be listed and if I have a free app on my iPad and I want it on the iPhone then I can just find it in the App Store and download it. The second thing to do is to filter out apps that have been deleted. If I download an app and delete it, it means I don’t want it! It shouldn’t come back and pester me to be downloaded again.