iPad 2: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7. Shop the App Store

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 iPhone and iPod Touch programs.

The App Store is where you download apps, or programs, that run on your iPhone, iPod Touch, and now, your iPad. You can find 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 companies creating new programs every week. It’s a hugely popular part of the Apple empire, with more than 18 billion apps downloaded as of October 2011.

With the iPad out for nearly two years now, you can choose from more apps than ever—of the 500,000 apps that work on iOS devices, more than 140,000 were written just for the tablet. This chapter shows you how to get shopping by setting up an account in the Store, buying and installing your first app, and keeping them organized once you start loading up your ’Pad.

Go to the App Store

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