There may not be have been as much hubub about the items and devices that Apple has released since the iPad as there has been in the run up to the release of iOS 5.
Apple made Monday a big day for its company with information about the iTunes iCloud, that will attempt to counter Google Music by allowing cloud storage for all sorts of files and not just music. While most of the features of iOS5 won’t be made available until the full release this fall, there has been some revamping of the features in the iTunes store with the release of iTunes 10.3 beta. One of the newest features is the ability to easily look at the apps that you have purchased over the course of owning your devices.
While it has always been fairly easy to see what you have purchased from the app store thanks to the fact that instead of a price next to any particular app, it says “install”, but the purchased apps are now easier to see in one place. However that isn’t really the biggest news when it comes to the “purchased” grouping. The really big news is that because the group literally lists whatever you purchased on a specific device, it actually does more than just show you what you already purchased. This new feature actually allows you to easily re-download apps you have previously purchased or downloaded and not just recently downloaded or purchased apps. This particular feature allows you to actually download apps that you once downloaded or purchased that are not actually available in the iTunes store anymore.
This of course does not mean that you can download an app that has been banned from the Apple app store but you can download apps that have been pulled out of the app store by the developers in place of other apps. This means that if you want to download the free version of Instapaper, the one that is no longer offered in the app store thanks to the developer replacing it with the paid version you can. Of course there aren’t a ton of apps that fit this criteria but there are a couple of apps that are better than the ones being offered now.
