Using Your iPhone to Find Apps

Finding apps with your iPhone is almost as easy as finding them by using iTunes. The only requirement is that you have an Internet connection of some sort — Wi-Fi or wireless data network — to browse, search, download, and install apps.

To get started, tap the App Store icon on your iPhone’s Home screen. After you launch the App Store, you see five icons at the bottom of the screen, representing five ways to interact with the store, as shown in Figure 15-6.

Looking for apps from your iPhone

The first four icons at the bottom of the screen — Featured, Charts, Genius, and Search — offer four ways to explore the virtual shelves of the App Store.

Tap the Featured icon and you’ll see a miniature version of the iTunes App Store (shown in Figure 15-1), with the same departments, namely Amazing Apps on iPhone 5 and Great Games on iPhone 5.

At the bottom of the screen are icons for Charts, Genius, Search, and Updates. Genius is perhaps the most interesting — it suggests apps you might enjoy based on the apps currently installed on your iPhone. The Charts section works much the same as the Featured section. Its three departments — Top Paid, Top Free, and Top Grossing — represent the most popular apps that either cost money (paid and top grossing) or don’t (free).

Each page displays dozens upon dozens of apps, but you see only a handful at a time on the screen. Remember to flick up and down and left and right to see all the others.

Know exactly what you’re looking for? Instead of simply browsing, you can tap the Search icon and type a word or phrase.

Or use the Categories button, which appears at the top of the Featured and Charts sections, which works a little differently because it has no apps. Instead, it offers a list of categories such as Games, Newsstand, Entertainment, Utilities, and Social Networking, to name a few, as shown in Figure 15-7.

Tap a category to see either a page full of apps of that type or a list of subcategories for that type. For example, the Games category offers subcategories such as Action, Arcade, Kids, Music, and Puzzle. Other categories have no subcategories — you’ll go directly to the page full of apps when you tap them. To make your browsing easier, each category or subcategory page has four sections — New, What’s Hot, Paid, and Free.

If you’re wondering about Updates, the fifth icon at the bottom of the screen, we discuss it a little later in this chapter in the imaginatively named “Updating an App” section.

Finding more information about an app

Now that you know how to find apps in the App Store, the following sections show you how to find additional information about a particular app.

Checking out the detail screen from your iPhone

To find out more about any app on any page, tap the app. You see a detail screen like the one shown in Figure 15-8.

Remember that the app description on this screen was written by the developer and may be somewhat biased.

Reading reviews from your iPhone

Tap the Reviews button (between Details and Related in Figure 15-8) to see the star ratings and reviews for that app. At the bottom of that page is another button: More Reviews. Tap it to see (what else?) more reviews.

Downloading an app

To download an app to your iPhone, tap the price button near the top of its detail screen. In Figure 15-8, the price button is the gray rectangle that says Free. You may or may not be asked to type your iTunes Store account password before the App Store disappears and the Home screen, where the new app’s icon will reside, appears in its place. The new icon is slightly dimmed, and appears with a blue progress indicator and the word Loading or Installing, as shown in Figure 15-9.

By the way, if the app is rated 17+, you see a warning screen after you type your password. You have to tap the OK button to confirm that you’re 17 or older before the app will download.

The app is now on your iPhone, but it isn’t copied to your iTunes library on your Mac or PC until your next sync — unless, of course, you’ve turned on Automatic Downloads as described earlier in the chapter. If your iPhone suddenly loses its memory (unlikely) or you delete the app from your iPhone before you sync (as described later in this chapter), that app is gone forever. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that after you’ve paid for an app, you can download it again if you need to — from iTunes on your computer or the App Store app on your iPhone — and you don’t have to pay for it again.

After you download an app to your iPhone, the app is transferred to your iTunes Apps library the next time you sync your phone.

Or, if you’ve turned on Automatic Downloads in iTunes (which is in iTunes Preferences on its Store pane), the app will appear automatically in your iTunes library almost immediately after you purchase the app on your iPhone.

Updating an app

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, every so often (or, for some apps, far too often), the developer of an iPhone app releases an update. If one (or more) of these is waiting for you, a little number in a circle appears on the App Store icon on your Home screen as well as on the Updates icon at the bottom of the screen. Tap the Updates icon if any of your apps need updating.

If you tap the Updates button and see (in the middle of the screen) the message All Apps Are Up-to-Date, none of the apps on your iPhone requires an update at this time. If an app needs updating, an Update button appears next to the app. Tap the button to update the app. If more than one app needs updating, you can update them all at once by tapping the Update All button in the upper-right corner of the screen.

If you try to update an app purchased from any iTunes Store account except your own, you’re prompted for that account’s ID and password. If you can’t provide them, you can’t download the update.