If you haven’t yet updated to the latest version of iTunes (12.7), you may have heard that this update removes the iOS App Store and Apps library. Many people have libraries of apps that they use from time to time, but don’t always want on their iPhones or iPads. This seems to be common among gamers, with some games being several gigabytes. If you don’t want to have to redownload your apps, and especially if your internet bandwidth is limited or capped, it’s practical to keep local copies.
When you update to iTunes 12.7, you won’t see apps any more, but they’ll still be on your computer. They’re stored in the Mobile Applications folder of your iTunes Media folder. You can see their names in that folder, but it could be handy to print – or save as a PDF – a list of apps from iTunes before updating.
To do this, select Apps from the Media Picker (the menu above the sidebar), then click Library. Choose View As > List to see all your apps in list view. Then click Date Modified so the most recently updated apps are at the top of the list. Sorting like this will make it easy to scan your list of apps and see which ones are recent and which are older. You may also want to sort by name, if you want to search that way. When you print, or save this list to a PDF, you can do both.
To print the list, choose File > Print, then select Song List from the menu in the dialog. You can see a thumbnail of what that list will look like.
You can print this on paper, by clicking Print, or, if you click Print, you can choose to save this list to a PDF (on macOS; I’m not sure what the process is on Windows), by clicking the PDF menu at the bottom left of the next dialog, then choosing Save as PDF. Here’s what the PDF looks like:
You can see that it shows the app name, the “Album,” which is the seller, and the Seller, which is, again the seller. (Don’t ask me why it saves these columns; you have no control over them.)
So you can use this list to check what you’ve downloaded from the iOS App Store, rather than going through a long Purchased list on your iOS device. And this list will include those apps that you’ve downloaded and kept, excluding those that, perhaps, you tried out and didn’t like.
In any case, get ready for no longer having access to apps, or syncing apps, with iTunes.