What the person you’re replying to means, is that Apple Music was added on top of iTunes as a new service rather than iTunes being scrapped completely. If Google were to do the same thing, then google play music would still be around and not be getting killed in favor of youtube music.
That’s a fair point. Though in this case aren’t google play music and youtube music substantially similar services?
Google’s reputation is that they will have 2-3 services with the same functionality. Whereas there are pretty legitimate business reasons you want want to make a streaming business distinct from a legacy content purchasing business.
Also I just happened last week to rip in Apple Music some of my teenager years CD before packing and storing them.
This is still an option. Likewise the playlists I created on the go on my iPod Nano in a 2008ish trip reliably got migrated from versions to versions up until now.
So there's iTunes (2001-2019, but arguably renamed to Apple Music, so not actually dead), and Ping (2010-2012), the latter of which had approximately three users.
Like for like, Google Play Music (2011-2020) isn't quite as long-lasting, but more to the point, I'm not sure Apple has simultaneously maintained two competing services before ultimately canceling one.
Then the GP commenter mentioned "chat services," which makes the position unassailable. Google seems to have launched and folder a dozen or two chat services over time[1].
You can make and receive FaceTime calls from any recent Apple device to any recent Apple device (e.g. Mac to iPhone) which is nice, but FaceTime’s real advantage is call quality. It’s noticeably more clear and seems to handle poor/unstable connections much better.
I can FaceTime with people halfway around the world with more clarity than I can talk to someone on the same WiFi network using WhatsApp.
The blue and green chat bubbles are the sender’s chat bubbles, not the receiver’s. So it’s the iPhone user with the colored bubbles, non-iPhone receives and iPhone receivers are white/gray.
It has a couple of really good use cases as it works on non-phones (macs and ipads). Little kids and some older people don’t have phones. I like the bigger screen for non-casual video calls.
Also, I was on a project with a colleague who had a poor internet connection and we found FT worked better than zoom. FT video quality seems to be the best of the services I’ve used but personally I don’t care about this part much.
I wouldn’t call these “killer features” but they are enough, with the integration into address book etc, to make it flourish.