iTunes Turns 13 Today -- Continues To Be 'Awful' (qz.com)

An anonymous reader points us to a link on Quartz: On April 28, 2003, Apple started up a revolution. Enter the iTunes Music Store, unveiled with a proud flourish by a beaming Steve Jobs. It was a digital jukebox, a music distribution game-changer, a record store to end all record stores -- and it did, in fact, kill off a great number of those. [...] For 13 years -- 15 if you count the two years the program was just a file-storing service -- users have grumbled loudly about iTunes' unwieldy interface, its bloated features, its inability to simply get better. [...] Instead of trying to streamline the service over the years, Apple has opted to stuff an overwhelming number of new features -- movies, television shows, podcasts, mobile apps, and most recently, Apple Music -- into it.The report mentions the following issues with iTunes: space-sucking size, slowness, ugliness, bloatware, lack of online or social integration, a wonky back-end, music isn't even its priority. Marco Arment, who is best known for co-founding Tumblr, and creating Instapaper app, noted some development-end issues with iTunes in 2015. He wrote: [...] The iTunes Store back-end is a toxic hellstew of unreliability. Everything that touches the iTunes Store has a spotty record for me and almost every Mac owner I know. And the iTunes app itself is the toxic hellstew. iTunes has an impossible combination of tasks on its plate that cannot be done well. iTunes is the definition of cruft and technical debt. It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946. Probably not coincidentally, some of iTunes' least reliable features are reliant on the iTunes Store back-end, including Genius from forever ago, iTunes Match more recently, and now, Apple Music.

Comments

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I'm a big fan and I do use it but when a writer has to scream "It'z Teh TERBBIGEAL HELLSHTUE!!!!1111!!!!" every other sentence I'm simply not going to take them seriously. Maybe too much politics makes me cynical but I don't find a lot of value in statements that need to use more adjectives than nouns. That to me reeks of fanboyism.

Re:Meh

[Mr D from 63]

I remember installing itunes on one of my desktops so I could use a gift card and get some music, I've never been so frustrated with software in my life, from account signups through music access, it just wasn't worth all that effort to listen to 20 bucks worth of music. I uninstalled, but I think it left a stain.

Re:Meh

[Applehu Akbar]

For most Apple users, the problem with iTunes is having to use it for functions that have nothing to do with music, such as backing up iOS devices to a computer or checking to see how much free space there is on your iPhone. Whenever I upload edited pictures to my iPad to do a slideshow, that too has to go through iTunes, while the application keeps pestering me to log on to the music store account, which is not needed for this operation, over and over again.

Winamp

[DogDude]

iTunes is truly awful. So much so that it's banned from all of our work computers (it installs all kinds of extra crap with it). Winamp, long after it's dead, is still the best music player there is.

Re:Winamp

[PhantomHarlock]

I continue to use Winamp to this day. I like organizing my music files directly as files and folders. I never understood the attraction of a piece of software that slurped in all your music haphazardly and piled it all together trying to rely on ID3 information to sort it out. Easy enough to create playlists in Winamp via drag and drop.

In my car I use a thumbdrive organized by folders, navigated with the car's entertainment unit. Fortunately most manufacturers are still supporting this method.

Awful == Working?

[s.petry]

I'm not a fanboi by any means. I have however used iTunes for music for at least 10 years and don't have any complaints. I buy an album, it downloads, I play music. I don't see a better Music platform out there for things like Albums and Songs, so I don't get the gripes. I ignore whining rants too, so think twice before providing your personal anecdotes.

Is Pandora better for Radio? Probably, maybe? I don't know, I listen to a radio for radio. Well actually I also occasionally use the iHeart app for radio, but mostly radio for radio. Is NetFlix or Xfinity better for videos? Probably, maybe, I watch movies on my TV or in a Theater. Is some free Tor sharing better? "free" may harm large studios who screw over musicians, but it also harms the musicians harmed by those same studios. Robbing a slave owner never freed any slaves.

People who's opinion translates to dollars have said that iTunes is something other than awful for 13 years. I'm one of them people.

Surprise!

[wkwilley2]

And here I was thinking iTunes was only awful on Windows for obvious reasons.

Re:And in another 13 years

[krisbrowne42]

And still making Apple more profit than some whole other industries.

A complex application dumbed down

[ErichTheRed]

I'm an occasional iTunes user on both the Mac and Windows versions. I usually start using it when I'm trying to figure out why sync isn't working, or to perform a reset on a phone. My experience, similar to what I've seen with other programs, is that Apple is using the "UX" excuse to dumb down the program. The problem is that since you can manage your phones completely independent of it now, you usually go into iTunes for 2 reasons - to fix problems or to use your music collection on the local machine. In my opinion, neither of these functions are optimal. Too much functionality is hidden or in places you wouldn't expect. This is the problem with consumer-focused software; it has to be completely idiot proof and look pretty, but that makes it less functional.

I'm not defending "GUI by engineer" applications like the ones I have to support at work either. I work with one right now where the configuration part of the app is simply a massive properties tree and XML editor for a 5K+ set of data. But the other extreme is no good either. When a reasonably intelligent person has to spend several seconds trying to figure out which magic gesture or barely-visible hotspot hides the functionality you need, something's wrong.

Re:Surely that's a typo

[Anonymous Coward]

It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946.

iTunes in 1946? Did I wake up in an alternate universe this morning?

Woosh? :)

It was a joke... To poke fun at the archaic and buggy nature of iTunes. As someone who reads slashdot, you are of course familiar with the generally accepted theory that the term 'bug' originated with work she did where they found an actual bug causing a computer problem... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper#Anecdotes

Re:Best article title on Slashdot for years

[shugah]

Personally, I think its a tie between Lotus Notes and iTunes are the worst software ever in any category.

I take it you've never used Sharepoint...

[Nova Express]

iTunes at least has a purpose and fulfills it. Really, what is the point of Sharepoint?