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Comment by kyleslattery | Hacker News Reader

To me, the biggest killer app for the iPhone is iTunes integration. I know many people with Android phones who don't use it for music (myself included) because it is fairly difficult to put music on it. And, given the fact that something like 75% of the media player market is iPod, that means that a lot of people have iTunes installed, and getting an iPhone set up is pretty painless. I know there are several music sync apps for Android, but from my experience, none of them are any good, and the fact that you have to actively look for a way to sync your music turns a lot of people off from the idea.

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"I know many people with Android phones who don't use it for music (myself included) because it is fairly difficult to put music on it."

You plug it in into a USB port and drag files over to the mounted drive.

Conversely, any app or product that requires me to use iTunes is pretty much out of the running for me because it is too damn annoying to work with.

that sound unnecessarily painful. what about the amazon mp3 integration, as well as good syncing through stuff like doubletwist

You plug it in into a USB port and drag files over to the mounted drive.

I hope that's not the only way to get music on an Android phone because it sounds like a PITA. I don't want to pick through 30GB of music looking for song files to add to my phone. With the iPhone I have selected some playlists that stay on the phone and are updated anytime I plug the phone back into the computer (also works for movies, books, documents, photos). I never have to think about it beyond adding a song to the playlist. I can also tell iTunes to finish filling the phone with whatever music it thinks I might want. From what I gather it uses play counts and date the music was added the library.

This is just way too complicated for the average user, especially if they're already using iTunes to manage their music (which they probably are). Instead of just plugging in their phone and having it just work, they have to:

  1. Plug the phone in
  2. Figure out that they have to pull down the notification shade and choose "mount disk"
  3. Figure out where iTunes keeps their music files
  4. Find the mounted disk on their system
  5. Copy over the files

Safari Mobile was the killer app for me. At the time I switched to iPhone, no other phone had a comparable web experience. This is no longer the case, as the competitive landscape for browsing has changed significantly.

Now that I'm locked in to (and satisfied with) iOS with respect to accessory and software purchases (in the very much the same way Canon photographers are unlikely to switch to Nikon), I find no need to switch to any other platform, even though they may be just as good as or a little better than iOS.

To me the only thing killer about the iTunes integration for the iPhone is that it almost kills the experience for me. I would really like to get rid of iTunes, but I can't since I need to use it to sync my iPhone.

For music I use Spotify, and Spotify has applications for both iPhone and Android.

I also listen to podcasts, but I would like to manage that entirely from my phone instead of having to use iTunes to download the episodes. I know you can get new episodes with the phone, but that is far too manual and requires WiFi which I keep turned off to save on battery.

Is this a joke? iTunes is a horrible app that is way to underpowered and annoying to use, you are limited to syncing which means you can't use it with more than one device or more than one computer, and you can't copy half an album or just a few songs from a playlist.

iTunes takes up the first twenty spots on the list of what I hate about the iPhone. It is awful in so many ways that it boggles the mind.

What's better? DoubleTwist? WinAmp?

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