IPhone – App no longer available in store. Transfer from old iPhone to new iPhone

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I have an app on my iPhone 4S called 7 Second Diet. It is no longer available on the app store. Luckily, it is still available on my iPhone 4S.

Two days ago, I bought a iPhone 6S. The transfer process was relatively painless. Everything copied across, and all the apps started downloading, except 7 Second Diet.

I still have the app on my iPhone 4S. I am looking for a way to transfer it to my new iPhone 6S.

iTunes used to let you save your apps to your Mac, but they have removed this feature in iTunes 12.4.1.

With iOS 9 or later, apps will not sync or transfer to iTunes via Transfer Purchases. If you would like to download your apps to your iTunes library, make sure to turn on Automatic Downloads for your iTunes purchases. You can also download past purchases. Source.

I tried a third party solution called iMazing and while this allowed me to copy the 7 Second Diet app off my iPhone 4S and onto my Mac as an .imazingapp file, it was unable to copy the app to my iPhone 6S. It gave a message saying I had to download the app from the app store to the phone before restoring it.

I also tried the download your past purchases technique in iTunes 12.4.1, but the app does not show up there either.

Does anyone have any solutions? Most solutions I can find only, including here on the Apple Stack Exchange, are out of date and not compatible with iTunes 12.4.1.

Best Answer

So after about an hour research I came up with this:

iTunes on Mac doesn't show previous purchases where iPhone does. BUT, it will only show if the developer is still active, if he has renewed his license or has other apps on the AppStore. So if he is active, you should still be able to download this app from AppStore -> Updates -> Purchased. But after a long research, I found out that it was developed by Aaron Block, and he is currently not active on AppStore, and his website has also expired. So you won't be able to redownload this app.

My source: I am a developer with expired license and can't find my own apps in previous purchased items where I could find apps like Downloads by Hian Zin Jong, and Trapster by Trapster.com which is removed from the AppStore but the developers are active (or renewed their yearly license).

Solutions:

  1. Backup your iPhone 4S, then restore it onto your iPhone 6S via cable on iTunes.
  2. Contact the developer and ask if he has the ipa, or project to build or to bring it back.

I can't think of anything else. Don't know if an earlier version of iTunes would work?

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