Apple it's Still Messed Up - Download All Updates

After I published my post yesterday, I started thinking about other things in my Apple universe that still behave stupidly, don't work, or just generally annoy me. It reminded me of the giant Powerpoint that came out of the Apple Samsung trial showing all of the features that Samsung copied, did wrong or were poorly designed. It began to make me wonder -- what if I went through my list.

So here's today's issue:

iTunes Update All Apps
I think this became a bug when Apple updated iTunes to the current version with the pull down menu to select music, apps, etc. I think that was iTunes 10 or 11, but I'm not sure. As someone who has been through every generation of iPhone other than the original, the method for updating apps on your phone was, traditionally, to use iTunes, download the app on your computer, then sync the phone with iTunes on your desktop.

There were a lot of reasons why this worked well -- often, your desktop Internet connection was better than the wireless connection on your phone. And there were also limits on the size of the download that you could pull down through a cellular network.

Okay, so when they moved iTunes to this pull down menu that ever seemed to be in the right interface, you had to go to Apps section, then check for updates (if there wasn't already several of them). If you had more than two, you were presented with a button that offered the option, "Update All".

When you click the "Update All" button, iTunes will ask you to authenticate with your password (if you haven't been downloading stuff already). Once you do this, iTunes will begin downloading the first of the apps to be updated. Once it has downloaded, the process dies. In order to update all apps, you need to click "Update All" a second time in order to restart the process.

It's something that seems like a simple bug, one that could be easily fixed. And yet, despite a number of updates to iTunes since the issue was introduced, no fix. It's still broken. It's not life ending, but it may be another brick in the Jump the Shark wall.