How do I download iPhone apps from the Apple iTunes store?

You aren't the first person to encounter this problem: I did too. The problem is that you appear to have diverged from the default configuration and so you now need to go into your preferences and tweak it to let you see the app store in iTunes. It's there (well, access to it is there) you just aren't showing it.

When I first started poking around, I figured that it'd just be a new category in the iTunes Store, actually, y'know, like podcasts and audiobooks, but it's not (rather confusingly, if you ask me, since in so many other areas the app store is functionally identical to the music store).

Start up iTunes 7.7 or newer and you're probably seeing something like this:

Where's the app store? To find it, you need to go to your Preferences...

As you can see highlighted, you need to ensure that "Applications" is checked. Do so, click "OK" and now there's a new item on the left side of the iTunes window:

Click on it and you'll get a nice big gray box without anything in it:

The key to getting online and visiting the App Store is to click on "Get More Applications" on the lower right corner. Now we're getting somewhere!

I'll click on "Twitterific" since I've been eager to get a better Twitter client (what? You aren't following me on Twitter? For goodness sake! Follow my main account @DaveTaylor and, if you're a movie fan, also follow @FilmBuzz too!)

For any given application, there's quite a bit of information available, as shown here:

You'll want to click on the small "GET APP" button, at which point if you're not already logged in to the iTunes Store you'll need to log in. I also found that I had to agree to some new terms of service wording and go back to click on "GET APP" a second time to actually download the app. Once you do, you'll see:

Kind of fun if you're used to just seeing sync messages, I'd say!

Once you download it -- and maybe another app or two -- your Applications library will be a bit more visually interesting:

As you can see, while some of the apps are downloaded, others are still just "placeholder" icons as they are sucked out of the App Store. It took roughly one minute per app for me to get them downloaded and I expect that'll be shorter as time goes on since today is the first day of the store and everyone's probably going crazy downloading things.

Now that you have apps on your computer in iTunes, you can use "Get Info" to see more about them:

I'm glad to see how small the applications are, actually. Notice that Twitterific is only 1.2MB, which means I don't need to erase all my music to add a few new apps to my iPhone.

Now that you have the apps you want for your iPhone, the next step is to upgrade the iPhone software itself (see how to upgrade your iPhone firmware to verison 2.0) and restart. Then you'll see an "Applications" tab for your phone in iTunes and you can easily select which apps -- or all applications! -- to copy onto your cellphone.