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!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's good to be able to focus on things, but this is way too categorized and just drives even more clutter.
I think that's overly reductive.
They have different kinds of metadata, distribution mechanisms, and ideal UIs.
But that's probably with the forcing podcasts on me when I don't want them rather than anything intrinsic.
I listen to music when I work because it blocks stuff out and I don't need to actually listen to it.
Podcasts catch my attention when one of hosts says something like:
Wait, you can't say that. You'll offend all the furries.
Then I'll have to rewind and listen to understand why they are talking about furries on an F1 podcast. But then it turns out I misheard it anyway.
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).
I don't see why a user should be forced to use different apps depending on the type of the audio content.
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.
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.
That's merely a reason not to use one /inadequate/ app for all audio.
Inadequacy is not an app requirement.
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.
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.