iPhone and the Mobile Applications directory27 May
Just posting this for future reference and to potentially help others.
I have close to 100 mobile apps for my iPhone, and they’re starting to take up a decent amount of space on my laptop (since they’re backed up/synced there). So, I moved them across to an external drive, where I also keep my iTunes music and videos. That seems simple enough.
However, upon syncing, iTunes copies all of the apps back to my ~/Music/Mobile Applications directory. Quite annoying to say the least.
To make a long post short, the solution was to simply create an alias from my external drive’s directory (that contains the apps), and then place that alias to ~/Music/Mobile Applications. Surprisingly iTunes does "the right thing."
Easy. Easy.