Confirming our suspicions, Apple will ignore Windows as it moves its ecosystem past iTunes and it has no plans to release Music, Podcasts, or TV apps on the world’s most popular desktop platform.

As you must have heard, Apple held its annual WWDC keynote address yesterday, a glitzy event that is more about consumer product announcements than the developer topics at the center of the show itself. Among the many announcements was macOS 10.15—yes, the fifteenth version of macOS—which will include native Apple Music, Podcasts, TV apps, as has been the case on iOS for years. iTunes, as was rumored, is dead.

Or is it?

Apple, as I guessed, is not releasing Music, Podcasts, or TV apps for Windows, a platform that is literally 15 times bigger than macOS. We know this because there are 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, and Apple announced yesterday that there are just 100 million Mac users. Instead, Windows users will have to make do with iTunes. Which will almost certainly never be updated again in any material way.

“Apple says users of iTunes [on] Microsoft Windows will not see any changes,” an Ars Technica article claims, citing “some broad answers” it got from Apple. “It won’t be broken up into several apps; it will work just like it does now … The company says that Windows users will continue to have the same experience as before and that it is not announcing any plans to end support for iTunes in Windows.”

Ars guesses that things could change in the future. And sure, that is one possible outcome. But it’s more likely that Apple will continue to ignore the platforms it can’t control as much as possible. It only supports these platforms when absolutely required, as it does with Apple Music (only) on Android, the most popular computing platform. Apple Music is on Android for the same reason that iTunes was back in 2003: Apple simply has no choice, due to the popularity of that platform and the edge it gives to competing services like Spotify.

“So, iTunes is not really dead,” Ars writes. “At least not yet.”

Wrong. iTunes is dead. It’s just the walking dead on Windows. Which is exactly how Apple likes it.

Tagged with iTunes