News - 11/11/2015

Apple Music is now on Android, but it’s no iTunes on Windows

Apple Music is now on Android, but it’s no iTunes on Windows

Apple Music made its debut on Android devices this week, as the company made a beta version of the app available for anyone to try. 

The Android version requires users to sign in with (or sign up to) an iCloud account, and this is presumably done so that Apple can figure out whether they have already enjoyed the free three-month trial or not. 

Aside from minor design changes implemented to accommodate Android’s look and feel - the app is identical to the iOS version. The only missing features are music videos and the ability to sign up to a family membership. 

Apple Music’s Android launch mimics to a certain extent Apple’s decision to bring iTunes to Windows back in 2003. 

Back then, Windows was installed on around 95% of the world’s computers. Given the lack of wirelessly connected mobile devices and the need of a computer to transfer tracks to the iPod, Apple simply had to release a Windows version in order to move beyond the small niche of Mac users. 

Android represents the biggest competitor to Apple’s mobile operating system and vastly surpassed Apple in terms of numbers of devices activated, however Apple's iOS devices now have a much more respectable market share than the Mac did in 2003 - around 13%. 

Also, today Apple is in a very different place: it can count on hundreds of millions of iOS devices that operate independently of a computer, and on hundreds of millions of registered credit cards (= users) on its iTunes Store. This means that Android users are not essential to the product's success.

In addition, Apple Music is not a groundbreaking product that Android users will necessarily flock to, since they have many different options to choose from in today’s ecosystem: Spotify, Deezer, Rhapsody/Napster, Rdio amongst others. The iTunes Store in 2003 - on the other hand - represented the first extremely user-friendly digital music store ever released, and the first with a catalogue that matched the expectations of the average music consumer.

This means that Apple Music’s release on Android, whilst being a nice addition and certainly a welcome one for those who juggle multiple devices, is not going to have anywhere near the impact that iTunes had when it launched on Windows computers. 

 

(Andrea Leonelli) 

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