There is a fundamental difference between Amazon and Apple’s online stores. Even though they both employ one-click-to-buy functionality to entice impulse shoppers, Amazon knows that they are dealing with a wide variety of products and price points and therefore allow users to bookmark products on a wishlist for later purchasing.

Apple’s iTunes and App Stores have no such functionality. Audiobooks aside, most of what Apple sells is 99 cent songs and $1 and $2 apps which, for most users, don’t require much deliberation. We click, we buy, and Apple surely has not regretted licensing Amazon’s 1-Click patent .

Nevertheless, I occasionally find more expensive apps that I’m not ready to purchase right away, or even cheaper apps that I have no immediate use for, but which I want to keep an eye on and maybe purchase later. Apple provides no wishlist functionality, I can’t mentally keep track of it all and actually switching to a different app to jot down a note is way to cumbersome for all we lazy firstworlders, so I’ve come up with an easier solution.

The trick is the “Tell a Friend” feature, present in iTunes on both the desktop and the iPhone. Instead of telling a friend about an app, you can tell yourself, and with a bit of Gmail trickery, you can automatically compile a wishlist of future purchases.

Just click the “Tell a Friend” button below the description of the app, and send the resulting email to yourself without changing the default text:

You can then set up a filter in your email client to automatically sort these emails into a folder, which then becomes your wishlist. In Gmail you can set up a filter to scan for emails containing the text “Check out this application” and file them away under a label called “Wishlist” or “Apps”, like I’ve done here:

Happy wishlisting!