Changing App/iTunes Stores' Countries

I used to think changing the country of your App Store/iTunes Store was a trivial matter - use up your existing credit, give them a credit card from your new country, that's it. It's not. Apparently, maybe due to accounting or copyrights, the different countries' stores are separate. After changing your country, your purchase history will be blank!

For the App Store, it doesn't seem to matter so much. There are 2 scenarios:

1. App is available in both countries' stores: People agree that you have to search for the app again, but when you download it, you won't be charged.
2. App is NOT available in the new country's store: If the app is on your device, you can update it. If it's in your iTunes library, you can transfer it to your device. If not, you can't get that app back.

I guess this means that before changing countries, you should make a list of apps you have, and try and store them in your iTunes library. Ideally you can note which apps won't be available in the destination country's store.

For the iTunes Store, it seems more serious. I don't think you can redownload anything at all. At least music has been DRM-free for the past few years, so you can continue to use it, just don't count on iTunes to restore your purchases. I don't know about books/TV/movies.

I haven't tried any of this, it's just what I've noted from people online.

What I wonder is: if you transfer back to your original country, will you get your purchases back? An alternative is to maintain 2 iTunes accounts, but the problem with this is apparently you can only change iTunes accounts on a device once every 90 days or something. I think I'll stick to the same store for now. Looks like most apps are available in all countries anyway.

iTunes Sink

Having some troubles with iTunes syncing again.

• iTunes is very slow, and so is syncing. Maybe my library didn't transfer properly or isn't optimised.
• Actually, syncing is much slower. It seems to get stuck on the first file.
• Sometimes it asks you to apply changes even if you didn't do anything.
• Speaking of apply changes, what's the difference between that and sync?
• It's asking me to delete all my apps if I want to sync apps, but I thought I've synced apps before. And the "after" previews of my iPhone screen show the same apps, but randomly arranged.

It feels like each sync is a gamble - you never know what's going to be changed. iTunes is flippant about your data - keep it, lose it, who cares?

iTunes has got the wrong idea

iTunes has got the wrong idea when it comes to syncing photos. You want to "sync" things that are changed frequently, like documents and music (playlists). Syncing photos creates the following problems:

• slow sync time (iPad 2 stuck on "Finishing sync")
• risk of accidents corrupting all copies, which could have been used as backups
• cannot move, rename, resize, archive photos (ok, I want to keep a copy of my holiday photos on my iPad to bore helpless saps, but I don't want to keep a copy in my Pictures folder)

And the additional problems if you don't use iPhoto:

• cannot add/delete individual photos
• cannot use subfolders

To some extent, the same problems apply with pdf files and movies in iTunes. Enter third-party photos apps. These have got it right:

• add and remove photos, not sync. Works like a USB drive. Add once and leave them. Forever.
• add individual photos - have an album of things you want to buy
• delete photos you don't want to show people
• password protect individual folders
• folders and subfolders, independent of those on your computer
• transfer photos by WiFi http server

I tested the app Photo Manager Pro, by Linkus, and am very satisfied with it.

In addition to the features above, it also has:

• search
• universal app!

I first got it to read comics, and found the search is very useful - you can just dump everything into 1 folder, and search for the chapter numbers to find the correct files. You can scroll between files in the search results, you don't have to return to the search page or even worse redo the search after each file.