iPad: The Missing Manual, 6th 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

• Automatically update apps

• 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 Air, iPad, or iPad Mini (and on your iPhone and iPod Touch, too). Yes, you can load up your tablet with far more programs than just the ones it comes with.

Now, a decade later, the App Store has gone big, offering a million apps in 155 countries. At least 475,000 of those apps were written just for iOS tablets, and you can find just about anything—language tutors, e-newspapers, restaurant guides, word processors, live television broadcasters, and sophisticated video games—in the App Store, with new programs debuting every week. It’s a hugely popular part of the Apple empire—as of October 2013, more than 60 billion apps had been downloaded!

After ...