Like sharks, they have to move forward or die.īut how often to update? This is the problem product managers wrestle with. Look around, and the pattern repeats on so many apps, because updates give the appearance of momentum. Why the update? So the desktop app doesn’t look out of date. Something similar has happened with Sonos, whose software for controlling its music players has had a radical remake – darker, blockier – on mobile, but not (yet) on the desktop, though you can foresee the latter app suffering a gravitational attraction towards the more-used app. But it often feels as though iTunes gets updated just because it needs to show some sort of forward motion.

Music is easily transferred in the cloud via iTunes Match or Google Music, or just streamed from Spotify, Deezer and the like.Įven so, look at how relentlessly iTunes gets updated, even when there’s no real change: nine updates in 2014. Windows users might hate iTunes (and don’t we know it) but it’s monolithic for a reason.Īnd it’s not that necessary now since 2011, iCloud has meant you can back up and restore from the cloud, though minimal storage on older iPhones makes iTunes necessary to install big operating system updates. Splitting iTunes into separate apps is often mooted by pundits, but won’t happen with more than 500 million users simply getting people to remember where to go for content would become a headache. Each can be updated separately there’s no grand foofarah, unlike an iTunes desktop update. It’s like a grocery store that has become a gigantic shopping mall, but never been able to stop to think about the best design for its current incarnation.Ĭompare that to the iPhone, where iTunes’s functions are split into five apps: Music (on-device music), iTunes Store (to buy music and video), App Store (for mobile apps), Videos (bought) and iBooks (for written content). As time progressed, it added syncing with iPods, then handling video and TV shows, then syncing with iPhones, then buying from the App Store, then syncing with iPads, until now it is a gigantic front for all sorts of content that struggles to coexist on a single desktop screen. Now, iTunes has come a long, long way since its first incarnation, when it basically played songs and did visualisations.

Update to the latest version of itunes