Last year I was helping a friend who has pretty poor internet connectivity upgrade his iPad to the latest version of iOS. To do this, I connected his iPad to my system, performed a backup in iTunes, then synchronized to update the operating system. This had the side effect of beaming some of his applications to my iTunes, which in order to continue, he authenticated against. His iPad updated great, and he was on his way.
Things on my machine seemed okay for a while, that was until some of the apps he purchased that I didn’t have wanted to update. Not having his password, I wasn’t able to update them, but even worse, Apple wasn’t announcing which apps needed updating with his account so I could simply delete them as I wanted to.
Instead, for over a year, I was greeted in iTunes by a numerical indicator saying I needed up update my apps, but when I went to do it, I was up to date. Every once in a while I’d recognize an app that I didn’t purchase (in a haystack of nearly 1,000 iPhone apps) and delete it. Only then did the number drop, but later rise again when some other app needed updating.
What I needed to do was list out all the apps by Purchaser.
One of things that really annoys me about Apple is that stuff that is trivial to implement, like putting an optional Purchaser column in iTunes, they don’t do. The feature is half heartedly there, though. Press Command-I for Info, and you can see the purchaser for an item.
Only now you have to click and inspect your whole app list. And with the number of applications I own, this doesn’t scale well at all.
Searching the web reveals that others are in a similar bind, and that Apple seems to really care less about the few handful of users with this problem. Like much on the Apple Support Site, it’s unhelpfully silent.
Frustrated, I decided to solve this problem once and for all. Open Terminal and cut’n’paste the following in:
for f in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Mobile\ Applications/*.ipa; \
do (echo "$f" ; unzip -p "$f" "iTunesMetadata.plist" | \
plutil -p - | egrep -i "\\"(itemName|artistName|AppleID)\\"" ) | \
perl -e 'while (<>) { if (m!^/!) { chop; $fqn=$_; } if (m/"(.+)" => (".+")/) { $e{lc($1)}=$2; } } print "\\"${fqn}\\",$e{\\"itemname\\"},$e{\\"artistname\\"},$e{\\"appleid\\"}\n";'; \
done