App Store Emigrant

App Store Emigrant is a Ruby gem that will manually attempt to verify whether any of your local mobile applications are out of date, which iTunes will refuse to do automatically once you have moved countries.

Supported Ruby versions: 1.9.2 or higher

Licensed under the MIT license.

Redundancy notice: Apple has since released a new iTunes version that remedies the issues noted below. This effectively marks App Store Emigrant as redundant, but it will continue to be maintained, for now.

For more information on the issues faced when moving countries with regards to Apple's ecosystem please see these discussions.

TL;DR: For reasons unknown to mankind, Apple has made it rather complicated to update applications bought in different stores, particularly after emigrating. iTunes mentions updates are available, but refuses to actually update these apps when asked to. These applications are also missing from the Purchases-tab.

App Store Emigrant tries to soothe these pains - albeit only partially - by scanning your iTunes library folder for mobile applications and querying iTunes for the latest versions available. One can then manually go into the store and update each application, one by one.

App Store Emigrant is available from RubyGems and can be installed through the command-line.

Fire up your favourite terminal and run:

gem install app-store-emigrant

Installing on OSX and using the default system Ruby? Run:

sudo gem install app-store-emigrant

Once installed, a new not-so-fantastically named binary called ase will be added to your path.

Invoke its scan task to start the verification process:

ase scan

If problems arise finding your default library, specify where your mobile applications lurk:

ase scan --library ~/m00sic

To clear the cache of application metadata, run the scan task with the -c or --clear-cache flag.

ase scan --clear-cache