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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

iTunes supporting Android would be great for Apple. Unfortunately, it would also be good for Google, so it's never going to happen.

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It would be great partially because the existing sync solutions for Android are all a little bit wonky. I don't think it would necessarily be great for Apple, though - I'm considering purchasing an iPod to listen to music on to get that better integration, and releasing iTunes for Android would commoditize the listening device - exactly what a shiny hardware manufacturer does not want.

Funny, one of the biggest reasons I moved to android was precisely to escape itunes

"It would be great partially because the existing sync solutions for Android are all a little bit wonky."

Eh? Winamp, DoubleTwist, Spotify, and even Windows Media Player all sync flawlessly, and Google Play Music and Android Cloud Player work great, too.

Winamp was OK but crashed a little too often for me to be able to rely on it. DoubleTwist is, hands down, the worst music software I have installed on my laptop in recent memory (I can expand on this if you want, but my overall summary is: terrible). I hadn't tried WMP or Android Cloud Player, and at the time Google Music wasn't available to me. Spotify I haven't tried yet because until today, I couldn't even get it to see my phone despite my laptop and phone being on the same wireless network, as per the instructions. It has finally shown up though so I will give that a go.

iTunes supporting Android would be great for all Android users. iTunes is a great market with excellent apps which are not ported for Android.Unfortunately,like you said,Google will never allow this.

I was thinking more for a music point of view. How many users could Apple win over into the ecosystem just by letting you sync your iTunes library with your Android phone? I'm thinking a lot.

I'm sure that, to Apple, the more relevant question is: How many iOS device users would they lose by letting you sync iTunes library with your Android phone?

I'd guess a lot, but even if that's wrong, it takes hundreds of incremental music sales to offset the loss of just one iPhone sale.

I don't know. Can I buy music from iTunes without installing some bullshit beachhead on my computer for Apple to push QuickSlime and Slowfari onto me?

Amazon MP3 works flawlessly. Who needs iTunes?

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