What's a reasonable approach for managing apps, associated with one iTunes account, on several iOS devices? I have an iPhone 4, an iPad, and an iPhone 3G repurposed as a "touch" for a little one. The short of it is, there are apps I have on my iPhone 4 that I don't want on my iPad, and some on the old 3G that I don't want on either. What's one to do?

I've tried managing by hand which apps sync on which device, but this information gets lost periodically, which means a huge app dump across the iPad and iPhone 4.

What would seem most effective is, while the "purchased" app pool would be common, each device would have a derived subset of this pool (so they wouldn't have to re-purchase), and so would/could never inadvertently sync apps from another device pool.

I suppose the checkboxing of each app approximates this, but it's very frustrating when this information is lost.

Any help for this? Thanks!
You can uncheck "Automatically sync new apps" in iTunes. This will avoid the situation where iPhone apps that you don't want to use on your iPad wind up getting synced over. Other than that, the only current solution is to manually check off each app you want on each device.