iPad: The Missing Manual

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 use. 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, iTunes added the App Store for the iPod Touch and iPhone.

The App Store is the place to download apps, or programs, that run on your iPod Touch, iPhone, and now, iPad. Thousands of apps, including foreign-language tutors, electronic newspapers, restaurant guides, hurricane trackers, tiny word processors, and sophisticated handheld videogames can all be found in the App Store, with developers writing new programs every week. It’s a hugely popular part of the Apple empire. Even before the iPad came out in April 2010, the App Store had sold three billion apps to eager iPod and iPhone owners.

And now that the iPad has arrived, there are more apps than ever. This chapter shows you how to get shopping by setting up an account in the store, buying and installing your first apps, and keeping them organized once you start loading up your tablet.

Go to the App Store

Remember when computer stores displayed shelves and shelves worth of software ...