Store iPhone Apps on an External Drive

(UPDATE 9:03 AM: see comments section for an easier solution if you haven’t setup your iTunes library yet.)

When I first heard that Apple was thinking about releasing a version of Leopard that was (almost) nothing but bug fixes, I thought “Nah, never hapen…”

Boy I hope I’m wrong.

Lately I’ve been finding more and more “little things” that need Apple’s attention.

For example: I recently jumped on the Drobo bandwagon, and one of the things I most anticipated was being able to put my iTunes library on it and never touch it again.

I’ve lost playlists, play counts, and more due to moving my iTunes library around in the past. I want to be able to, as they say, “Set It and Forget It.”

The Problem

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t make this as easy as one might like.

Sure, it looks easy enough:

But guess what? Not everything gets added there.

For example, album art, podcasts, and mobile applications (aka iPhone/iPod Touch apps).

All of these continued to show up in ~/Music/iTunes.

The Hack

This is not a great solution. It isn’t something I would suggest that anyone else do unless they were willing to take full responsibility for their actions and hold harmless anyone who suggested it to them.

But there is a solution.

Simply put:

0) Make sure iTunes is not running

1) Create an Alias of your “Mobile Applications” folder on your external drive

2) Drag the Alias to ~/Music/iTunes (where ~ refers to your home directory)

3) Rename the Alias to remove the word “Alias” from the end of it.

Here’s a 16-second video showing you how it is done

(If you’d like to download that, right (or “option”) click this link and save it to your hard drive: MakeMobileApplicationsAlias.flv.)

4) NOTE: after you do that, launch iTunes — and none of your Mobile Applications will appear!

5) Don’t panic

6) Drag all of your applications (Note: they should all end with .ipa) from the Finder window into the iTunes “Applications” window. You may get warnings about Older versions. I just kept hitting “Replace” (otherwise the whole import seems to cancel. Another bit of Snow Leopard attention needed).

7) Give iTunes a few minutes to process the applications (it will be clear when this is finished).

8) Download any updates that iTunes tells you are available

9) Sync your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Note: you may notice that I did the same thing for “Album Artwork”, and “Downloads” and “Podcasts.” I have no idea what the long-term effect of that will be. Again, caveat emptor (if it breaks, you get both pieces and all of the responsibility. Welcome to adulthood. :-)

Another Answer

You might wonder why I didn’t just make an alias of the iTunes folder from my Drobo to my hard drive.

The answer is simple: the first time I tried it, iTunes threw an error and failed to launch.

However, when I went back to try it again (to record to error for you, gentle reader), it seemed to work just fine.

Except that I was starting from a clean iTunes slate.

That wasn’t too bad for me, given my fairly-new iTunes slate anyway, but it might be a problem for others.

The Real Answer

Of course, the real solution is for Apple to fix iTunes so that it stores album artwork, podcasts, and mobile applications wherever the user wants, rather than where Apple thinks is best.

The Unix Way

Being a long-time hard-core Unix geek, the way that I would actually do this is in Terminal.app:

cd ~/Music/iTunes
ln -s ../../../../Volumes/Drobo/iTunes/Mobile\ Applications  ../../../../Users/luomat/Music/iTunes

But I am, as I said, I’m sort of a giant geek. Or nerd. Or whatever it is they’re calling us now.

Fini

Until we meet again - adieu…