iTunes should be a platform, not a bloated app | Hacker News Reader

iTunes should be a platform, not a bloated app

sachin.posterous.com

35 pointsa4agarwal11 comments

I kind of get the feeling that that's coming. I have no proof, of course, but I just have the feeling that Apple isn't satisfied with the current setup, either.

Indeed, we saw the Mac App Store launch as a separate application instead of being jammed into iTunes.

It's a lot easier to make new things separate than to break up all the existing stuff. I imagine the iTunes break-up will come, I just hope it doesn't take too long to get there.

I can't see that happening. The problem is iTunes is Apple's Trojan horse to get on Windows. They were able to separate the Mac App Store because by nature they don't need it on Windows. But almost everything else iTunes does (music, TV, movies, device management, apps, etc) needs to be cross platform to work out economically. If they were to break it up, they would have to fight to make each program popular on Windows.

iTunes will probably have to remain a monolith until iDevices can be self sufficient machines, which I don't see coming in the near future. Of course, there is no reason why they can't make it a better monolith in the mean time.

They could simply bundle the programs together so that you need to install all of them together.

Honestly, if iTunes is Apple's Trojan horse, they really need to improve it. It is, without exaggeration, one of the worst programs I've used. I've heard it's much better on Mac, but the experience of having used it daily for years really put me off of Apple in general.

Mac App Store is not even related with portable devices synchronization or media playing and purchasing, areas that's traditionally iTunes covers, why would Apple even consider including it as a feature of iTunes?

More than that - you shouldn't even need a full blown PC or Mac to use an iDevice [1]. Syncing should largely be over-the-air, with a Time Capsule/Airport Extreme style device. OS updates could be done from such a device, too - they have USB ports after all.

Although it's risky as Apple might shut you down, I think it could be done by a third party with some effort. If our startup ends up going nowhere and nobody has done it by then, we will.[2] The potential is insane, IMO. It's crazy how many people we know who either have an iPad as their main computing device, or who would be served well by it if they didn't have to maintain a classic personal computer to back up/update the iPad.

[1] Syncing should still be better than the current iTunes situation if you do.

[2] Maybe, maybe we can eventually do it as a side project without losing too much focus. I think the market is bigger than for our current product, but it's also much riskier, and would realistically require investment, whereas we can in theory bootstrap indefinitely right now.

I seem to recall having to give them a credit card number to activate the iPad, am I wrong on this? If so, that's a good incentive for them not to offer OTA updates, etc. It puts consumers in front of content for sale, at worst.

They could move the activation into an on-device app that launches on first boot before proceeding to the home screen. In any case there currently exist hacks for activating your iDevice from a Linux (!) box [1], so it clearly works without a credit card, additional restrictions imposed by iTunes itself notwithstanding.

[1] https://github.com/posixninja/ideviceactivate

You can already do some of those things in a 3rd party app via API (except for in-app purchases and iTunes authentication). Of course there are downsides like the AppleScript API kind of sucks and you need iTunes app running for it to work.

However to really become a platform iTunes needs to move to the cloud. Let's hope Apple will get it right with their rumored iTunes streaming service.

Is there a reason to not use the Apple COM SDK for iTunes? link: http://developer.apple.com/sdk/itunesvisualsdk.html Or are we (you) talking about something more app store oriented?

That's just for writing visualizers.

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