It seems I am running out of memory on the iPhone.
One of the culprits seems to be the enormous Lonely Planet travel guides I downloaded. I am not actually going anywhere, but Lonely Planet made the app free for a short period of time when the European volcano practically shut down all the travel to Europe. And of course, I can’t resist a deal like that.
So if I delete the guides off the phone, I think I can just leave them in my iTunes. And on the off chance I am headed to Stockholm, I can just pull the thing off of ITunes and it will be updated and ready to go? I won’t have to purchase it?
I think it might be easier to just get a bigger card. I don’t have an iPhone but in my experience iTunes tends to like to sync things so deleting things off the phone might be risky.
You can absolutely do this. And if you go really nuts, and delete it out of iTunes, if you repurchase the app, it will notice that you’ve already paid and let you download again free.
You don’t put bigger memory cards in iPhones. They come with what they come with.
De-select syncing those apps. They’ll be removed from the phone, but kept in iTunes.
Click on the name of the phone under ‘Devices’ on the left side of iTunes next time you have it plugged in. That will bring up the ‘Summary’ screen showing the iPhone, Version and Options. Go to the App syncing tab (Summary, Info, Apps) and uncheck those apps on the list. Click ‘Apply’ in the lower right. It will sync, and remove those apps.
When you want them back, just go back in and check them again.
Apps, music, etc, are stored in iTunes by default.
You select individual items in iTunes to sync to your device (iPhone, iPod, etc).
You can remove apps from the device manually. If you then sync the device without changing the settings in iTunes, iTunes will reinstall the apps on the device.
If in iTunes on the computer you deselect the app from syncing, then sync the device, iTunes will remove the app from the device.
Same goes for movies, music, etc. What happens in iTunes on the computer takes precedence over what happens on the device. This is why if you go to sync a full iPhone (or iPod or iPad) to iTunes on a different computer that has no such content, that iTunes will offer to erase the contents that you’re syncing, instead of copying the contents of the iPhone to the different computer. (There’re ways around this, but it is Not Obvious, and I’ve never got it to work well.)
You need one computer to act as your master reference.
You can just deselect them from syncing. That way they’ll be removed from the device.
I have dozens of mostly free apps that I almost never use, and don’t sync to my device, but they’re still in iTunes, if I ever want to put them back on my device.
Now removing an app from iTunes itself to free up space on the computer, that’s different. Go to the Apps section of your iTunes Library, right-click on an app, and select Delete. iTunes will delete the app from the library, and offer to delete the files from the computer (this is optional). It will remind you that it will then delete the app from any devices it my be present on at the next sync.
Don’t know if you’re on PC or Mac, but on the PC iTunes backs up my Apps folder. If you go to the backup folder you can sort the app files by size to see what takes the most space. The big culprits on mine are games, especially 3D ones.