Apple is officially killing its bloated iTunes app. Rumors surfaced late last week and came to fruition this afternoon. The announcement was just made at Apple's annual World Wide Developers Conference today, June 3rd. The announcement was made by Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi.
But just because iTunes is leaving, it doesn't mean that the features within iTunes are leaving. Federighi revealed that the functions in iTunes would be split into three separate applications – Apple Music, Podcasts and Apple TV.
Federighi showed screenshots of these apps to give us some new info. The Apple Music app looks to integrate the Apple Music service as well as your local music library. Take a look:
The podcasting app does exactly what you expect. Apple also showed off new technology where you would be able to search for content from within a podcast and Apple, through machine learning, will be able to figure out which episode you are looking for and provide you results. We'll see how well that works.
As for syncing your phone, Federighi suggests all that functionality has been moved to the Finder:
But what about music downloads? Federighi brushed past it quickly, but he did mention that music downloads would be managed in the Apple TV app.
That's all fine and good for Mac users, but what about iPhone and iTunes users on Windows PCs? At the moment, they did not indicate if the PC app was also being killed and replaced by the three apps. We will keep you posted when that information becomes available.
Another interesting feature announced at the conference is an update to Apple Watch software that will actively measure decibel levels around you and inform you when the volume around you is so loud that it could permanently affect your hearing:
