Is the popular app for playing music and videos about to make way for new recruits? Here's what's happening in the Cupertino company
iTunes is one of the most important applications in the Apple landscape. It allows you to download and play music, videos and movies thanks to the wide catalog available in the homonymous Store. Not to be underestimated, then, the role of the program in the diffusion of iPhones: its simple and intuitive interface has played a major role in making the applephone manageable by both Mac computers and Windows devices.
A glorious history, in short, but that soon may have an end. On March 25, the Cupertino company hinted that this application will be shelved, or rather spun off, to make way for a series of tools designed to better enjoy multimedia content. This will allow Apple customers to take advantage of some services on MacBook and iMac, which is not possible with the current version of iTunes. The revolution is expected to happen with the release of the macOS operating system update.
iTunes: Apple decides to retire it?
iTunes has always been one of Apple's most used services, perhaps in part because it represents the only way to access listening to a song, rather than viewing a video on the device. At the end of March, however, the company announced that it would be breaking up this tool to focus on other services. For example, there will be a new TV app available for macOS that will allow users to take advantage of the Apple TV+ service on Macbooks and iMacs.
The change will come with the entry of the new macOS 10.17 version. After the update, the app will continue to exist, but will be spun off. The news was given by developer Guilherme Rambo, who confirmed that Apple is working on tools that will independently manage Music, Movies and TV, Podcasts, eBooks.
Some previews of new apps coming
During the March 25 event, Guilherme Rambo shared some previews of new apps coming, the ones that were once all contained within iTunes. There will be a solution for every type of app. They showed the new icons that will be used for Podcasts and TV apps in the new macOS. Also, the Music, TV and Podcasts apps will be developed with Marzipan, a technology designed by the company that will make it even easier to move some typically mobile apps to the Mac without intervening too much in their code. Apple has also worked to make the web version of Podcast more intuitive and usable, and above all it won't be necessary to go through iTunes. This is confirmed by the fact that the different episodes will have the URL podcasts.apple.com and no longer itunes.apple.com. These clues clearly say that the many internal applications are going to become independent and free from the mother app. iTunes has however sown well and after almost twenty years of activity can retire satisfied with what it has left behind.