iPad: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition

Chapter 8. Shop the App Store

You’ll learn to:

• Create an Apple ID

• Buy, download, and install apps

• Sync apps with all your iOS devices

• Set program preferences

• Troubleshoot apps

IN THE BEGINNING—2003, TO be exact—there was the iTunes Music Store. Apple’s perfectly legal online emporium sold songs for 99 cents a pop and quickly became a hit itself. The premise and the promise were simple: inexpensive entertainment you could instantly download and enjoy. Just a few years later, the renamed iTunes Store added (and still sells) TV shows, movies, and simple arcade-style video games for iPods. And then, in 2008, Apple added the App Store for iOS programs. The App Store is where you download apps, or programs, that run on your iPad or iPad Mini (and on your iPhone and iPod Touch). Yes, you can load up your iPad with far more programs than just the ones it comes with.

You can find tens of thousands of apps—including foreign-language tutors, e-newspapers, restaurant guides, hurricane trackers, tiny word processors, and sophisticated handheld video games—in the App Store, with new programs debuting every week. It’s a hugely popular part of the massive Apple empire—as of October 2012, more than 35 billion apps have been downloaded.

After four versions of the iPad, and with the iPad Mini now joining the family, there are more apps than ever: 700,000 for iOS devices, with 275,000 of those written just for ...