ITunes NOT updating applications correctly

Question

Things are not well in the land of iPhone Application updates. Below are some observations and thoughts on might be causing them. Please post your experiences since I assume I'm not alone here.
Step 1: I noticed in the iTunes sidebar that 2 applications had updates (thats the little number that shows up next to the applications sidebar item)
Step 2: I click on the number and it opens an update screen that displays 6 applications. Why display 6 of my 10 or so applications when supposedly only two have updates.
Step 3: I click on the option to update all applications and 6, not 2, are downloaded
Step 4: No auto sync happens so I manually sync and only one of the 6 update on my iphone.
Step 5: In order to actually get the new versions onto my iphone I have had to manually delete each of the updated applications and then add them back. Huge pain especially since application load/unload times are so long.
Here is the common thread I've found so far. If you right click an application's icon in iTunes and get info, it will show a version number. Only one of my applications actually showed an incremented version number...you guessed it...the one that actually re-synced to my iPhone.
The other applications still showed version 1.0, but when I manually forced a sync, I could see that the new functionality was present. AIM is a great example of this. ITunes store shows it as version 1.1. iTunes on my Mac indicated an update was present. I "updated" the application and sync'ed, but the "show info" on the AIM application remains 1.0 and it did NOT sync the new code to my iphone. After manually deleting AIM via selective sync'ing applications, I was able to get the new code onto my iphone.
I've been able to reproduce this with Phone Sabre, AIM, Light, and several others.
Another side problem is that whenever you update an application, it downloads it to your mobile applications folder and does not overwrite the old version. This may well be by design, but that folder is going to get ugly with all the versions sitting there. AIM, AIM-1, AIM-2, etc.
The naming, btw, has nothing to do with the version numer it's just part of OSX; when it encounters a file of the same name it uses the same name but appends an incremented number at the end.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Yeah...this is definitely NOT a firewall issue.
It is a version control and file management issue.
There are lots of applications that the App store still calls V 1.0 even though w/in the application itself, it is listed as 1.x.
This is often true of the application icon listed within iTunes on your Mac. For example, right click and get info on AIM, it will show as v1.0 even thought it is actually 1.1.
To be honest, iTunes needs some serious work when it comes to how applications are updated. Some attention to detail with respect to version numbers will fix the problems I've listed above, but the file management is another story.
Why? Well, how many people have multiple "versions" of a song, ringtone, or video that they want referred to by the same name. Ummmm...none that I can think of. iTunes was not designed with "updates" in mind. A different version of a song...is...well...a different song. You probably want both the original and the cover version of that Beatles tune.
For applications, we want just the opposite. If artists actually released the the draft versions of their music via iTunes, then maybe it would be similar, but they don't.
Some reasonably straight forward Applescript should be able to fix this issue, but that certainly wouldn't work for our friends in the PC world.
Apple is going to have to find some way to stage new versions and then archive the old ones with the option to delete them either immediately or over time.
As it stands now...it's a pretty big mess.