Apple last summer unveiled the new Home, News and Voice Memos apps built using Project Marzipan, its upcoming new APIs for building cross-platform iPhone, iPad and Mac apps. This year’s wave of Marzipan apps is said to include the new standalone Music and Podcast apps for macOS, signaling an iTunes breakup may finally be on the horizon.
That’s according to Irish developer Steve Troughton-Smith who in a series of tweets last Friday expressed his belief, based on concrete evidence that he wouldn’t reveal, that Apple could split iTunes into separate apps for managing music, podcasts and books, potentially relegating the app as we know it to a desktop sync client for iOS devices.
He wrote:
I am now fairly confident based on evidence I don’t wish to make public at this point that Apple is planning new (likely UIKit) Music, Podcasts, perhaps even Books, apps for macOS, to join the new TV app. I expect the four to be the next wave of Marzipan apps. Grain of salt, etc.
Apple already has a standalone Books app on macOS, but Troughton-Smith may be referring to a Marzipan rewrite that could allow Apple to simplify code while achieving feature parity with the iOS version and potentially including support for audiobooks like on iOS.
As for the new TV app, we already know that it’s coming to the Mac platform this fall ahead of Apple’s new video-streaming service, dubbed Apple TV+.
Apple is working to incorporate its iOS-only frameworks into macOS to help developers port their iOS apps to the Mac platform with minimal changes. An early SDK is expected to debut at WWDC 2019, which is scheduled to run form June 3 through June 7 in San Jose.
Would you like to see the bloated mess that is iTunes split up into separate apps?