First, it's relevant to understand the history of what made Apple the behemoth they are today and no matter what random outlier opinions about iTunes you see, i

First, it's relevant to understand the history of what made Apple the behemoth they are today and no matter what random outlier opinions about iTunes you see, it's absolutely iTunes + iPod and what that brought to the general public for managing media and having a great portable media experience 15 years ago. So yeah iTunes is still a core concern when it comes to managing iOS devices of certain types. When iPhone came out the primary selling points included it being an iPod, were you there? I was. There is no way in hell they were going to let go of the signature usability boon that people relied on and made them rich. So yeah, iPhone was managed by iTunes and for a long time it was the only way to manage media, contacts, etc. on it or do that sort of thing. iPad was included in this, as well. Over time, alternative options for managing your device data and such have been implemented. Today you can use iOS devices without ever once connecting to iTunes if you want. Sure. On the device there is a file browser though it's semi sandboxed as you can imagine. You can backup to the cloud if you want hence this discussion. It's all independent. If you want. However, iTunes still provides some very useful abilities. Besides offering a vastly improved UI for managing your media, it offers things like full image restores, deep encrypted backups (requiring no internet access to restore) and recovery features. You can place data directly into individual app sandboxes, or copy videos/music/etc. directly to device. Despite what another commenter mentioned, I very much doubt these features will be removed. Maybe they will move out of iTunes. A long time ago there used to be a tool called iSync that was dedicated to device sync/interactions on Mac OS X and I could see that kind of approach being revived. It's very nice to have an OS provided, reliable way to recover a bricked phone, or recover backups without blowing an entire weekend of downloading/installing not to mention data usage restrictions many people still endure. Anyway, TL;DR: you can use iTunes but you don't have to because history.