9 years ago
4
This Is Apple Music's Worst Nightmare
“Apple music is a nightmare, and I’m done with it,” Jim Dalrymple tweeted Wednesday to his 35,000 Twitter followers.
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Apple Music certainly seems to be having a bit of a rough start, although personally I have encountered only minor glitches and the occasional crash. This is "beta" quality software at best and it would've been wise to announce it as such.
I think it's safe to say that anything iTunes related is easily among the least impressive of Apple's software offerings. Here's hoping they can iron out the bugs before too many people get burnt.
When I had an iPhone (back in the iPhone 3G days) the phone was nice compared to everything else, but I dreaded using iTunes, especially on a Windows box. They were wise to get away from needing iTunes to do updates.
The logical thing for Apple to do would be to replicate what they've done on iOS: have separate Music, Videos, App Store, iTunes Store, etc. apps. Having all of them rolled into one huge monster of a desktop app is clearly unsustainable in the long term.
I have some experience with long-running software projects, and I can imagine the code has grown too convoluted to achieve any kind of clean split at this point. I hope they already have a project started where they port or reimplement Mac versions of the iOS equivalents, and have a new iOS Sync app for dealing with manual syncing and wired updates.
It is not uncommon for Apple to respond quickly in these public cases, and so they have helped Jim get his music back. This is good, however it highlights the fact that the service is oddly complicated. It seems the service and the iTunes app are similar in that they are following the strategy of just rolling new things into the old offering, making it ever more complex and fragile.