Apple gets a lot of kudos for its design chops, but there’s one product everyone thinks Cupertino can improve: iTunes. The bloated Swiss army knife app for managing everything from your music library to the apps on your iPhone has been begging for a rethink for years. Yet for whatever reason, Apple has yet to deliver a true design overhaul of iTunes.
The situation has gotten so bad, iTunes is now being assigned to college students as a design problem. Students at German college Fachochschule Potsdam were assigned the task of splitting iTunes up into 16 different apps. And the results look pretty good!
As part of the Rethink iTunes program, the students were told to split each major function of iTunes into separate apps: Albums, App Control, Apple Books, Apple Tags, Demand, Devices, iGear, iRadio, Movie Time, Music Finder, Podcasts, Push, Shows, Simplay, Sync and Vision. Each app was fully developed as a UI concept, complete with multiple mock-up screenshots.
One of the interesting things about this project is, I think, it provides a bit of perspective for people who argue that iTunes should be split up. Sure, if you only want to do one or two things, an iTunes suite might make sense — but 16 apps to replace a single app is bound to confuse more people than it helps.
I still think iTunes will eventually just go away, and all of its functionality will be slurped into iCloud. But what do you think? Check out the link below for details on all the app concepts.
Source: Rethink iTunes
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
15 responses to “Would iTunes work better split into 16 different apps?”
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16 apps is a bit much, but ever since we were able to start managing all our music ON the device, I’ve needed iTunes less and less. In fact, my iPhone 6+ has synced all of ONCE with iTunes…to get all the music that couldn’t be stored in the cloud (custom tracks). Just once. I’ve never needed to sync it again, and I’m glad, because iTunes slows everything to a crawl and there’s so many issues with stuff not syncing properly.
I wouldn’t say 16 apps, but I’ve always maintained that it should be split up, where each app contains a library with a player, and store. For example: My Music, Music Store. My Books, Book Store. My Videos, Video Store. The other apps, such as DeviceCenter, AppCenter, etc could also be there. Finally, streaming could be a whole separate app, something like AppleMedia, combining both music and video – now that’s something I would subscribe to.
something I was pondering over earlier today when I was feeling bored. A lot of apps can be rearranged in function so as to avoid messy arbitrary overlaps.
I’d like to see a unified AppStore that combines iOS Apps with OSX Apps and allows you to manage them from there. Along with Movies, Music and Books, all with their own stores built into each app. As far as syncing is concerned, I think there should be a separate manager app, but who does that anymore anyway? That would leave 5 apps instead of iTunes, but it would mean getting to your content would be quick and easy.
All apps are together.
Way too logical.
16 apps is too much, but they are on the right track. If iTunes could be split into three apps, that would be ideal OR maybe just toss it all together and do everything from the device with apps and iCloud.
Nah, I don’t see a problem. Just click the links and you will get to where you want to be. I’m find with everything in one place.
On the computer side, I’d like a much better way to organize PDFs and such. When providing an iPad kit for our dealers, I would like for them to move all the content onto their iPads in one shot and then not have to screw around assigning categories, authors, etc. to the PDF content. (No way on earth would they spend the time to do it themselves, besides, I’m not about to go through the effort of revising an illustrated guide every time Apple releases a new version of iTunes.)
On the iOS side, sometimes I just want my iTunes library on my phone – no radio, no Connect, no Apple Music, and no tiny icons that I constantly hit by mistake and then have to back my way out of (try that with a 6 Plus while driving and without a bluetooth receiver – it’s downright dangerous).
I use iCloud Music & Backup, don’t really need iTunes anymore.
16 is ridiculous. It could certainly be split into a few though.
Do you use iTunes in your mobile or computer? Mobile is limited while computer is not. iTunes may only need to be rethink in a way to simplify the program itself. And not to split the program into such apps.
I think 16 apps is overkill and not that many are needed.
One simple solution to start whittling iTunes down would be to extract the management and syncing of iOS apps from iTunes. On OS X this would more naturally fit in the already existing stand alone App Store app. Instead of this being just for Mac apps, it could be repurposed for apps of all of Apple’s platforms and could make use of tabs to separate content and respective stores for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
I’ve been cursing iTunes for probably the last five years, if not more. Memory hog, freezes, why can’t I just add one song to my phone without doing a full update?
Not all of it is the “swiss army” theory but IMO just poor design/planning/whatever it’s called in tech; for example, I don’t want a bloated, takes-too-long landing page every time I go to the store, I just want a place to enter my search. If I’m on an album page and go to my own songs, then back to the store it doesn’t bring me back to where I was on the album page. With the recent updates, if you go to the “songs” results for a search, it will only give you 100 (even if the artist in question has more than 100 songs) and a message that results were left out. These are all just poor programming that give the impression of difficulty to use – because it is.
Also, I don’t use iTunes for movies, books, whatever, so I don’t see how it works beyond music and apps. Seems to me, though, there’s already an App Store so why have a separate apps section in iTunes?