Apple is officially killing off the iconic iTunes platform.
During their Worldwide Developer Conference Monday, the company announced that they would be killing off the outdated iTunes application in favor of standalone music, podcast and tv apps which have already been running in the current iOS version.
via Tech Crunch:
“Customers love iTunes and everything it can do. But if there’s one thing we hear over and over, is can iTunes do even more?,” he teased before jokily presenting a version of iTunes that bundles in other Apple apps like Calendar and Mail, which got a laugh.
As far as those stand alone apps go, what we’ll assumably see is what we have been seeing on our Apple iPhones or iPads for the past couple years, just rolled out for the new desktop OS. The music app will be much of what iTunes offered in the past in terms of smart playlists and library management coinciding with their Apple Music streaming service.
The podcast app will enable the user to search and subscribe to their favorite audio shows while the tv app will sync up with third party applications like Hulu or Netflix. Furthermore, the tv app will, like iTunes in the past, give the user the ability to buy or rent movies but also provide and outlet for the new Apple TV+ service coming out later this year.
So essentially what we have is Apple actually streamlining the iTunes app, something that has been well overdue now, really ever since it’s inception back in 2003. Presumably gone will the the bulky updates that end up slowing down your computer, an interface that was supposedly about music in name only, a lack of social integration and massive amounts of memory the program actually occupied within your hard drive.
