Apple has been getting a lot of flak for their stupid decision to remove apps from iTunes. You can no longer access the iOS App Store, nor can you sync apps from on iTunes library, with iTunes 12.7.
But it seems the company has made a compromise, especially for business users who do need this functionality and who don’t want to use solutions like the Apple Configurator app.
In a technical note entitled Deploy apps in a business environment with iTunes, Apple provides a link to a version of iTunes 12.6.3, which allows you to download, manage, and install apps as before. It will replace the version of iTunes 12.7 that you have installed, or update any older version.
If you download this version of iTunes, you won’t get any notifications for updates to the app, so if you do want to use this, I recommend doing so on a virtual machine, or on a separate installation. But this version of iTunes will let you do what you could do so easily before.
Why couldn’t Apple just have, for example, a preference in iTunes allowing people to turn on these features? They seem to not have fully appreciated how many people – businesses and individuals – who want to manage and install apps using iTunes.
Update: It’s important to note that this new version will not be able to read your iTunes library if you’ve already updated to version 12.7. You should rebuild your iTunes library, as described in this article.