I like how Apple's page starts with "When iTunes was originally released, it had everything you needed to be entertained. Now, there are individual apps for all your media" - yes, exactly! That's the problem!
I disagree. It is nice to have separate apps for Music, Podcasts and audiobooks. You know, do one thing well.
Spotfiy tries to do all of these and it's a bloated mess.
Back in the day, you uploaded all your own media. you didn't have access to hundreds of thousands of streaming options across music, podcasts, and movies. Having a single app to upload your media and sync to your MP3 player was optimal.
Now that everything is streaming, and accessible on mobile without a need to sync to a local source, the benefits of media type unity is much weaker. It's easier to have individual apps that provide access points to each type of media library and optimized for that type of media.
But,
There are still those of us (such as myself) that prefer the local media sourcing, using iPods, etc, and that would love a unified app without any store. Just a window into my personal media library and the ability to sync it to a handheld device. Though the options for handheld devices these days are both slim and expensive...
One thing I miss with the move to mobile and cloud-first is that you used to be able to organize your phone apps on a desktop which I did every 6-12 months to clean them up. I find that's a real pain on an iPhone. I guess I can just remember names and search but I liked a more organized layout over 4 or 5 screens by general category.
That's because they're a bloated SaaS company trying to monetize M4A files.
A music app simply lists what you have available. SaaS bloatware on the other hand constantly changes its UI to maximize engagement and nudge users towards ad-stuffed podcasts, because the music is a loss-leader for them.
“Do one thing well” isn’t the same thing as “make several almost identical copies of a monolith, all wearing different hats”.
I just hope this doesn’t actually come with three times the resource impact of iTunes. As far as I remember from my Windows days, iTunes was enormous and basically supplied half the macOS standard library and frameworks compiled to DLLs with it.
The new apps seem to take more advantage of the open source collaborated cross-platform version of Foundation rewritten in Swift that uses as much of Windows' WinUI and other native libraries as it can get away with (via more direct WinRT/Swift bindings), much thinner than the Objective-C Foundation the old iTunes was built on that used very few Windows native libraries. The apps themselves are still closed source so we don't know for sure, but overall they seem less bloated and more "Windows native" than the old iTunes, while apparently still sharing a lot of Swift code with their Apple platform relatives.
It's a fascinating new version of the old stack that works much better on Windows, if those things are true. At least in my usage so far, the Apple Music and Apple TV apps feel much better on Windows than iTunes ever has.
Unlike Apple, which can have all their apps installed by default on their OS, Spotify doesn’t have such luxury. They’re lucky if users take the time to download and install their one app let alone asking them to install multiple apps.
I’m sure if Spotify had the choice they would split things into separate apps. Having separate apps makes it much easier to deploy changes since you don’t need to coordinate (as much) with other teams for every release.
> They’re lucky if users take the time to download and install their one app let alone asking them to install multiple apps.
In practice, this doesn't appear to be an obstacle. Companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, etc. have many apps in the App Store "Top Charts".
If anything, this would be a smart marketing strategy if Spotify could (for example) make a compelling standalone "podcast" app, because it would allow them to double or triple their footprint on App Store charts.
I doubt anybody would care about Spotify putting everything in one app if podcasts, etc were just sidebar items, especially if there were settings to hide them, but the issue is that they’ve intentionally made these things hard to avoid. There’s no way to signal to the Spotify app that you care only about music and will never be interested in other Spotify offerings.
As opposed to just ... a tab in iTunes?
There's a lot to hate about iTunes historically, but having the useful stuff in one place was not the thing to hate, and the additional value each app brings is almost nothing, whereas the clutter they bring is real.
It's good to be able to focus on things, but this is way too categorized and just drives even more clutter.
To be fair iTunes wasn't that great either, it was mostly a necessity to use iPhone (Update etc). Personally I haven't used any of these apps since it became possible to perform backups and updates without a computer.
Perhaps its the elder millennial in me, when I am on my desktop PC, I like to keep my taskbar clean and not have all these windows scattered about to keep me entertained, gives me a feeling of clutter. I like to have one app that just does everything for me when it comes to audio entertainment, I like the Spotify app for that reason.
Maybe it was a function of iTunes rather than an integrated app but I always found it sort of a mess. As I recall the only reason I started using it for music was that syncing from my other music library app just got too cumbersome.
My issues with the individual apps isn't that they're individual, it's that they're all Catalyst apps. This brings with it mandatory sandboxing, so my media files must live on my system drive. Any attempt to relocate them violates the sandbox, and it's recreated clean.
It's pretty neat, and pretty surprising, that I can still sync my iPod in 2024. But having a large collection of audiobooks means there's a lot of data clogging up my system drive - where audiobooks would otherwise be an ideal candidate to be offloaded almost anywhere else (they're slow, they're infrequent, etc).
Because there are specialization that are important. Longer form audio generally requires a more robust set of controls for chapters, audio playback speed, timed skips and resume than a bog standard audio player. Not to mention that a podcast player is going to need functionality for finding new podcasts, displaying information both at a podcast level and individual episode level, providing some kind of way to 'subscribe' and thus download said podcast (for offline listening) or stream it on the fly.
General tools are great and I'm never going to argue that there should not be generalized tools (like say a VLC), but specialized tools are also great and should be encouraged where they make sense. To me the differences between listening to music and listening to audiobooks or podcasts are different.
My problem is – certain features of podcast apps (like tracking of your playback position and tracking of listened/unlistened episodes) are also very useful for my collection of radio comedy. That collection however mostly doesn't come from actual podcasts, but instead has been accumulated from all sorts of places.
Most podcast client apps don't allow manually importing files, so I'd have to maintain fake podcast feeds for all my local files. There's software for that, too, but it'd still be more cumbersome than with iTunes where I just need to set the media type of those files to "Podcast" and I'm done.
> Because there are specialization that are important. Longer form audio generally requires a more robust set of controls for chapters, audio playback speed, timed skips and resume than a bog standard audio player
That's merely a reason not to use one /inadequate/ app for all audio.
Podcats (I use Overcast) are pretty different from music and I wouldn't generally intermix them. And you already have Library and Streaming modes of Apple Music so podcasts would be yet another mode.
The things is that iTunes also allows you to manually reclassify you media files as a podcast, and I found (still do, actually) that very useful for managing my collection of radio comedy scrounged together from all sorts of places (downloads from BBC iPlayer, downloads from various places collecting that kinds of shows, a very few genuine podcasts). That way I could keep them out of the main music library, gain the listened/unlistened episode display and playback position tracking, and still easily sync them over to my phone [1].
Without iTunes, I would have to set up some fake local podcast feed on my computer to get those episodes into the podcast app of my choice instead.
[1] Using iSyncr + Rocket Player after switching from an iPod to an Android phone – sadly those apps were sold by the original developer two years ago, though, and the new owners are seemingly just trying to turn them into a cash grab, so I cannot recommend them any more, though for now the old versions sort of keep working, albeit you need a rooted phone to work around some issues.
On the other hand Apple Music already has audio streaming and playback and a Library mode so should Podcasts write their own?
While yeah debundled separate apps will make probably the main use case of what was the bundled app better it also likely leads to stagnation and buggier experiences over time in the apps where the less popular features were debundled into.
Like all knowledge and talent required to code the Audiobooks app is the same as whats required to code the Music app so which team would you rather be on given the choice.
I don't know if you remember but iTunes was the overbloated app from hell that couldn't be refactored because it was too far gone. Every year it got slower and buggier and increasingly just wouldn't work.
Thank god they started cleaving off chunks into separate new apps that got built from scratch. It was a monstrosity.
I don't understand why you think separate apps is a problem. Heck, the #1 complaint about Spotify is that they added podcasts and audiobooks into the existing app rather than as new apps, which clutters up the interface.
Strong disagree, when itunes was about managing your phone generally (backups, resets, file transfer), managing your personal music collection on and off your phone, managing and playback (sans books i think) your itunes store purchases (music/movies/books)... it was too much. It created a weird usability nightmare where things that should have not been blended were blended.