7 ms·

Apple starts cutting the bloat from iTunes by removing iOS App Store

66 points by mrzool 9y ago

roflchoppa 9y ago
Damn, I liked the iOS feature to sync applications, back in the day when Apple was blocking Bitcoin applications it was the only way to get Coinbase back onto your phone.
- Synaesthesia 9y ago
  Yeah I found it somewhat annoying when they moved all the apps to the cloud and off local storage because my internet is metered and expensive. But that happened quite a while ago.
jakebasile 9y ago
All I want for Christmas is a standalone native Apple Music application for Mac and Windows (and Linux, why not?). I'd accept an Electron "native" application, even. I own a 2016 MacBook Pro and a custom built Windows gaming machine with an i7-7700, GTX 1080ti, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, and a 1TB SSD and on both systems iTunes lags terribly. I sometimes can't even drag the window around without slideshow rendering. Updating takes 2-3 minutes and sometimes requires a restart (for a media app!). It's time to rewrite - maybe this is the start of that?
- brandonmenc 9y ago
  I simply do not believe this. I have a loaded 2017 13" MacBook Pro (i7, 16GB RAM) and iTunes is fine. A few months before that my machine was the least-powerful 2015 MacBook Air (11", i5) and iTunes was fine on that too.
  - jakebasile 9y ago
    The problems are much more pronounced on my Windows machine but I assure you the iTunes experience is far worse than that of Spotify. I have no reason to lie about it.
  - Osmium 9y ago
    It's a big enough application, I'm sure some people have issues with it under certain workloads. I'm the same as you however -- I've never had issues with iTunes performance. I don't love the design, I'm glad they're simplifying it, but it always performed better than Spotify for me (which is the main reason I switched actually; I found the Spotify app to be terrible).
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    Got a 2013 MBP (also i7, 16Gb RAM) and iTunes flies on it. It's perfectly usable on my i5 T440 with 8Gb of RAM on windows 10 as well. The only thing that pisses me off about it is the ellipsis next to the track names on the song list.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    I simply do not believe this. Your profile implies that you write software for a living, and you're going with "resolved: works on my machine"? Especially with something that has the breadth of iTunes, along with the vast number of users, I'm most certainly willing to believe that there are cases of iTunes not running well on powerful machinery.
    - kfriede 9y ago
      > write software for a living > resolved: works on my machine Haven't we all thought this at least once in our careers?
      - mikestew 9y ago
        Thought it? Hell, I've got the sticker: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-works-on-my-machine-certification-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-works-on-my-machine-certif...
    - brandonmenc 9y ago
      > you're going with "resolved: works on my machine"? We're on a casual forum, all evidence here is anecdotal, and I don't work for Apple, so yeah.
- forgotmypw 9y ago
  IJLTH https://swinsian.com/ https://swinsian.com/
  - pcsanwald 9y ago
    upvote isn't enough: I love swinsian! Switched over to using it after iTunes introduced a bug where an annoying popup happens if you turn off wifi and try to play a song.
  - jacquesc 9y ago
    This looks damn good! Trying it now.
  - jakebasile 9y ago
    This looks like a great solution for those with a local music collection, but unfortunately my main use for iTunes is for Apple Music. I don't keep music on my drive.
- geon 9y ago
  How about Vox? https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player
  - theak 9y ago
    I'm a pretty big fan of Vox. If you're looking for a stripped down iTunes/Foobar2000-like player for Mac it's a good option. In addition to local media, there's even Soundcloud integration if you get your tracks from there, which beats using their web app.
- spike021 9y ago
  I never have performance issues with iTunes other than the rendering in Apple Music views, but I feel like that's more of how the code is written than iTunes itself struggling. My main issue with AM at least is that when I add music to my library, I wind up getting a bugged library. As in, there is music I added to my library 3 months ago that for whatever reason is always at the top of my most recently added music. I haven't touched it since adding, but it winds up being on top of my actual most recently added music. That's definitely a bug.
- mmjaa 9y ago
  I gave up on Apples' Music app .. and just use VLC, now. There is something very liberating about using VLC on iOS, and managing my own music archive, manually. Sure, it feels like 1996 all over again - but at least I know exactly where I stand, and what I'm bringing with me, with VLC.
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  On Mac OS X an app doesn't do anything if you drag it across the screen. If that causes problems they are caused somewhere else. For instance if you open a million large windows so they don't fit in your graphics card memory the system will fail to composite them smoothly.
ahakki 9y ago
At this point it is pretty clear that, at least on the Mac side, iTunes has no future. The Mac is clearly moving towards an iOS-like setup where there are seperate Apps for Videos, Music, Podcasts, and so on. Now that Apple has discontinued all non-iOS based iPods (so everything except the iPod touch) this raison-d'être has also disappeared. What remains to be seen is how this plays out on Windows.
- minikites 9y ago
  > What remains to be seen is how this plays out on Windows. Given that a computer isn't really necessary to operate an iOS device these days, could Apple just cancel the Windows version of iTunes without a replacement?
  - jakebasile 9y ago
    That would leave Windows users without access to Apple Music, Podcasts, Movies, TV Shows, and so on.
    - monochromatic 9y ago
      Yeah, that's not very likely.
    - cmiles74 9y ago
      They could just use their phones or other iOS devices. I would think the number of Windows users who use iTunes and do not have an iOS device must be vanishingly small.
      - jakebasile 9y ago
        When I’m gaming, I don’t want to use my iOS device. I want the music coming out of the same headphones I’m already wearing.
- CharlesW 9y ago
  > What remains to be seen is how this plays out on Windows. My bet would be that iTunes/Win32 will be replaced with web apps, requiring Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) for DRM. iTunes for Windows currently relies on QTML ("QuickTime Media Layer"), which is the porting layer that the QuickTime team created to bring QuickTime (and QuickTime Player, etc.) to Windows. I'm sure that Apple would love to kill QTML as soon as they can. I'm also reasonably sure that Apple isn't interested in Universal Windows Platform (UWP) development. That leaves web technologies as a likely solution, which (based on iCloud's web apps) Apple's pretty good at, and seems to be betting on in earnest.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
I still use iTunes 10.6.3 because it's the last version with Miller Columns on the top, playlist folders (with a Library view), a miniplayer that I can use to fast-forward, and sync. Syncing music. Contacts. Calendars. Safari Bookmarks. Notes. Apps. Ringtones. Videos. Photos. The killer feature of the Apple ecosystem was the way the Digital Hub worked together. It's all gone by now. They demand always-on Internet to connect to the cloud. I'm trying to rewrite my own ecosystem one app at a time (I've done Notes and Maps, halfway through contacts & calendars, and still need to start music & photos). It's going to take years of on-and-off work, but I don't trust Apple to keep providing that, so I must make my own. Some shell scripts linking other apps just won't cut it for me - I want a scriptable, syncing ecosystem that Just Works.
- _red 9y ago
  The most frustrating aspect of iTunes is the things that break from release to release...I shouldn't really say 'break' as its more they simply remove functionality. Case in point: Look at your iTunes screen right now in Artists view. See lots and lots of missing artist pics (pink microphones)? It used to be that you could manually set an artist pic, but they simply removed that and offered no workable solution. Its like a year 1 programmer approach. Its sorta amazing to me that the same company that produces Logic Pro, Garage Band, Final Cut...has such a lackluster music player. Its schizophrenic. Sadly as Apple has ballooned in size, I only see these problems getting worse.
- Osmium 9y ago
  > They demand always-on Internet to connect to the cloud. It's interesting, you're talking about a syncing system (syncing requires connectivity) and have an issue with requiring access to one of the most convenient sources of connectivity, which is the internet. We're in a transition time right now. Access to the internet is not always available. It is not always fast. But this time will pass. It makes sense, to me, to design for this future. > I'm trying to rewrite my own ecosystem one app at a time [...] I must make my own. I sympathize with this (and good luck!). But I could spend a lot of effort organizing my digital life, but (for me) it feels like I would be a slave to this effort, and what does it get me, really? I spent a long time organizing my digital movie collection; now most films I want to watch are on streaming services. I spent a long time organizing music; now Apple Music and Spotify are much more convenient. There was an essay from a while back floating around online about the ever-increasing burden of organizing our digital lives. I wish I could find it now, but it really summarized a lot of what I feel about this.
Alex3917 9y ago
This is super annoying. Having to use the tiny phone screen to scroll through apps and read reviews is a terrible user experience.
- gumby 9y ago
  I assume the store will still work on the web (including the purchase by fingerprint if you have a recent MBP); after buying your app you would then download it from your phone.
jacquesc 9y ago
So... how do I get my iOS .ipa files onto my phone now without submitting it to the iOS store?
- et-al 9y ago
  fwiw, you can still download older versions of iTunes for macOS and Windows: https://support.apple.com/downloads/itunes https://support.apple.com/downloads/itunes It's kind of a relief given the App Store orientated nature of the Apple ecosystem.
- radicaldreamer 9y ago
  XCode organizer
  - vbezhenar 9y ago
    And if I don't have Xcode (or macOS)?
    - Synaesthesia 9y ago
      Then you can’t publish iOS apps, or develop them. You need macOS. You can run hackintosh if you really need it.
      - vbezhenar 9y ago
        I don't need to publish or develop them. I need to install them. It's frequently needed for testers.
        dbbk 9y ago
        TestFlight
        vbezhenar 9y ago
        TestFlight is not usable. The real alternative is something like diawi, but it's still less convenient than manual installation via iTunes.
jotjotzzz 9y ago
They should also address the crap Music app on iOS/iPhone.
jameshart 9y ago
Interesting. What will be the flow for users who click on 'Download on the App Store' links in desktop browsers now? Will Apple enable purchase in browser on itunes 'preview' pages like this https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monument-valley-2/id1187265767?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monument-valley-2/id11872657... ?
- jakebasile 9y ago
  Clicking that started a loop for me. Safari attempted to open iTunes, which showed a blank screen for a moment and then opened the link in Safari, which attempted to open iTunes, and so on. I had to quit iTunes to stop it.
  - nodamage 9y ago
    Wow, same here. This is actually pretty appalling from a user interface perspective. Edit: must be something related to the query string, as this URL does not have the same issue. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monument-valley-2/id1187265767?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monument-valley-2/id11872657...
amysox 9y ago
Any ideas how to get custom ringtones onto an iPhone now?
- kintamanimatt 9y ago
  Plug the phone in with a cable, and drag them into te Tunes folder on the device. There doesn't seem to be any way to delete them now though!
  - amysox 9y ago
    I'll have to give that a try. I just moved phones, and I want to get the custom ringtones I've already created onto the new phone. I don't particularly want to delete them. :)
kgc 9y ago
Good move.

66 points by mrzool 9y ago

Damn, I liked the iOS feature to sync applications, back in the day when Apple was blocking Bitcoin applications it was the only way to get Coinbase back onto your phone.

Synaesthesia 9y ago
Yeah I found it somewhat annoying when they moved all the apps to the cloud and off local storage because my internet is metered and expensive. But that happened quite a while ago.

jakebasile 9y ago

All I want for Christmas is a standalone native Apple Music application for Mac and Windows (and Linux, why not?). I'd accept an Electron "native" application, even. I own a 2016 MacBook Pro and a custom built Windows gaming machine with an i7-7700, GTX 1080ti, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, and a 1TB SSD and on both systems iTunes lags terribly. I sometimes can't even drag the window around without slideshow rendering. Updating takes 2-3 minutes and sometimes requires a restart (for a media app!). It's time to rewrite - maybe this is the start of that?

brandonmenc 9y ago
I simply do not believe this. I have a loaded 2017 13" MacBook Pro (i7, 16GB RAM) and iTunes is fine. A few months before that my machine was the least-powerful 2015 MacBook Air (11", i5) and iTunes was fine on that too.
- jakebasile 9y ago
  The problems are much more pronounced on my Windows machine but I assure you the iTunes experience is far worse than that of Spotify. I have no reason to lie about it.
- Osmium 9y ago
  It's a big enough application, I'm sure some people have issues with it under certain workloads. I'm the same as you however -- I've never had issues with iTunes performance. I don't love the design, I'm glad they're simplifying it, but it always performed better than Spotify for me (which is the main reason I switched actually; I found the Spotify app to be terrible).
- cjsuk 9y ago
  Got a 2013 MBP (also i7, 16Gb RAM) and iTunes flies on it. It's perfectly usable on my i5 T440 with 8Gb of RAM on windows 10 as well. The only thing that pisses me off about it is the ellipsis next to the track names on the song list.
- mikestew 9y ago
  I simply do not believe this. Your profile implies that you write software for a living, and you're going with "resolved: works on my machine"? Especially with something that has the breadth of iTunes, along with the vast number of users, I'm most certainly willing to believe that there are cases of iTunes not running well on powerful machinery.
  - kfriede 9y ago
    > write software for a living > resolved: works on my machine Haven't we all thought this at least once in our careers?
    - mikestew 9y ago
      Thought it? Hell, I've got the sticker: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-works-on-my-machine-certification-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-works-on-my-machine-certif...
  - brandonmenc 9y ago
    > you're going with "resolved: works on my machine"? We're on a casual forum, all evidence here is anecdotal, and I don't work for Apple, so yeah.
forgotmypw 9y ago
IJLTH https://swinsian.com/ https://swinsian.com/
- pcsanwald 9y ago
  upvote isn't enough: I love swinsian! Switched over to using it after iTunes introduced a bug where an annoying popup happens if you turn off wifi and try to play a song.
- jacquesc 9y ago
  This looks damn good! Trying it now.
- jakebasile 9y ago
  This looks like a great solution for those with a local music collection, but unfortunately my main use for iTunes is for Apple Music. I don't keep music on my drive.
geon 9y ago
How about Vox? https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player
- theak 9y ago
  I'm a pretty big fan of Vox. If you're looking for a stripped down iTunes/Foobar2000-like player for Mac it's a good option. In addition to local media, there's even Soundcloud integration if you get your tracks from there, which beats using their web app.
spike021 9y ago
I never have performance issues with iTunes other than the rendering in Apple Music views, but I feel like that's more of how the code is written than iTunes itself struggling. My main issue with AM at least is that when I add music to my library, I wind up getting a bugged library. As in, there is music I added to my library 3 months ago that for whatever reason is always at the top of my most recently added music. I haven't touched it since adding, but it winds up being on top of my actual most recently added music. That's definitely a bug.
mmjaa 9y ago
I gave up on Apples' Music app .. and just use VLC, now. There is something very liberating about using VLC on iOS, and managing my own music archive, manually. Sure, it feels like 1996 all over again - but at least I know exactly where I stand, and what I'm bringing with me, with VLC.
tinus_hn 9y ago
On Mac OS X an app doesn't do anything if you drag it across the screen. If that causes problems they are caused somewhere else. For instance if you open a million large windows so they don't fit in your graphics card memory the system will fail to composite them smoothly.

ahakki 9y ago

At this point it is pretty clear that, at least on the Mac side, iTunes has no future. The Mac is clearly moving towards an iOS-like setup where there are seperate Apps for Videos, Music, Podcasts, and so on. Now that Apple has discontinued all non-iOS based iPods (so everything except the iPod touch) this raison-d'être has also disappeared. What remains to be seen is how this plays out on Windows.

minikites 9y ago
> What remains to be seen is how this plays out on Windows. Given that a computer isn't really necessary to operate an iOS device these days, could Apple just cancel the Windows version of iTunes without a replacement?
- jakebasile 9y ago
  That would leave Windows users without access to Apple Music, Podcasts, Movies, TV Shows, and so on.
  - monochromatic 9y ago
    Yeah, that's not very likely.
  - cmiles74 9y ago
    They could just use their phones or other iOS devices. I would think the number of Windows users who use iTunes and do not have an iOS device must be vanishingly small.
    - jakebasile 9y ago
      When I’m gaming, I don’t want to use my iOS device. I want the music coming out of the same headphones I’m already wearing.
CharlesW 9y ago
> What remains to be seen is how this plays out on Windows. My bet would be that iTunes/Win32 will be replaced with web apps, requiring Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) for DRM. iTunes for Windows currently relies on QTML ("QuickTime Media Layer"), which is the porting layer that the QuickTime team created to bring QuickTime (and QuickTime Player, etc.) to Windows. I'm sure that Apple would love to kill QTML as soon as they can. I'm also reasonably sure that Apple isn't interested in Universal Windows Platform (UWP) development. That leaves web technologies as a likely solution, which (based on iCloud's web apps) Apple's pretty good at, and seems to be betting on in earnest.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

I still use iTunes 10.6.3 because it's the last version with Miller Columns on the top, playlist folders (with a Library view), a miniplayer that I can use to fast-forward, and sync. Syncing music. Contacts. Calendars. Safari Bookmarks. Notes. Apps. Ringtones. Videos. Photos. The killer feature of the Apple ecosystem was the way the Digital Hub worked together. It's all gone by now. They demand always-on Internet to connect to the cloud. I'm trying to rewrite my own ecosystem one app at a time (I've done Notes and Maps, halfway through contacts & calendars, and still need to start music & photos). It's going to take years of on-and-off work, but I don't trust Apple to keep providing that, so I must make my own. Some shell scripts linking other apps just won't cut it for me - I want a scriptable, syncing ecosystem that Just Works.

_red 9y ago
The most frustrating aspect of iTunes is the things that break from release to release...I shouldn't really say 'break' as its more they simply remove functionality. Case in point: Look at your iTunes screen right now in Artists view. See lots and lots of missing artist pics (pink microphones)? It used to be that you could manually set an artist pic, but they simply removed that and offered no workable solution. Its like a year 1 programmer approach. Its sorta amazing to me that the same company that produces Logic Pro, Garage Band, Final Cut...has such a lackluster music player. Its schizophrenic. Sadly as Apple has ballooned in size, I only see these problems getting worse.
Osmium 9y ago
> They demand always-on Internet to connect to the cloud. It's interesting, you're talking about a syncing system (syncing requires connectivity) and have an issue with requiring access to one of the most convenient sources of connectivity, which is the internet. We're in a transition time right now. Access to the internet is not always available. It is not always fast. But this time will pass. It makes sense, to me, to design for this future. > I'm trying to rewrite my own ecosystem one app at a time [...] I must make my own. I sympathize with this (and good luck!). But I could spend a lot of effort organizing my digital life, but (for me) it feels like I would be a slave to this effort, and what does it get me, really? I spent a long time organizing my digital movie collection; now most films I want to watch are on streaming services. I spent a long time organizing music; now Apple Music and Spotify are much more convenient. There was an essay from a while back floating around online about the ever-increasing burden of organizing our digital lives. I wish I could find it now, but it really summarized a lot of what I feel about this.

Alex3917 9y ago

This is super annoying. Having to use the tiny phone screen to scroll through apps and read reviews is a terrible user experience.

gumby 9y ago
I assume the store will still work on the web (including the purchase by fingerprint if you have a recent MBP); after buying your app you would then download it from your phone.

jacquesc 9y ago

So... how do I get my iOS .ipa files onto my phone now without submitting it to the iOS store?

et-al 9y ago
fwiw, you can still download older versions of iTunes for macOS and Windows: https://support.apple.com/downloads/itunes https://support.apple.com/downloads/itunes It's kind of a relief given the App Store orientated nature of the Apple ecosystem.
radicaldreamer 9y ago
XCode organizer
- vbezhenar 9y ago
  And if I don't have Xcode (or macOS)?
  - Synaesthesia 9y ago
    Then you can’t publish iOS apps, or develop them. You need macOS. You can run hackintosh if you really need it.
    - vbezhenar 9y ago
      I don't need to publish or develop them. I need to install them. It's frequently needed for testers.
      - dbbk 9y ago
        TestFlight
        vbezhenar 9y ago
        TestFlight is not usable. The real alternative is something like diawi, but it's still less convenient than manual installation via iTunes.

jotjotzzz 9y ago

They should also address the crap Music app on iOS/iPhone.

jameshart 9y ago

Interesting. What will be the flow for users who click on 'Download on the App Store' links in desktop browsers now? Will Apple enable purchase in browser on itunes 'preview' pages like this https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monument-valley-2/id1187265767?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monument-valley-2/id11872657... ?

jakebasile 9y ago
Clicking that started a loop for me. Safari attempted to open iTunes, which showed a blank screen for a moment and then opened the link in Safari, which attempted to open iTunes, and so on. I had to quit iTunes to stop it.
- nodamage 9y ago
  Wow, same here. This is actually pretty appalling from a user interface perspective. Edit: must be something related to the query string, as this URL does not have the same issue. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monument-valley-2/id1187265767?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monument-valley-2/id11872657...

amysox 9y ago

Any ideas how to get custom ringtones onto an iPhone now?

kintamanimatt 9y ago
Plug the phone in with a cable, and drag them into te Tunes folder on the device. There doesn't seem to be any way to delete them now though!
- amysox 9y ago
  I'll have to give that a try. I just moved phones, and I want to get the custom ringtones I've already created onto the new phone. I don't particularly want to delete them. :)

kgc 9y ago

Good move.