Last week Apple made the announcement that it was scrapping iTunes, in favour of three separate apps that would do most of the work: Apple Music, Podcasts, and TV. This is great news, because iTunes sucks and has sucked for several years.
The only issue is that the worst version of iTunes isn’t actually going anywhere, because it’s sticking around on Windows. You know that place where iTunes was even worse, because Apple barely bothers to support it.
Apple revealed this information to Billboard’s Micah Singleton, confirming that Apple isn’t dropping iTunes for Windows. He also confirms that the iTunes music store will be available in Catalina’s Finder app,as well as Apple Music’s sidebar.
*iTunes Music Store will be available in the sidebar in the Music app
— Micah Singleton (@MicahSingleton) June 4, 2019
According to Ars Technica Apple doesn’t have any plans to drop iTunes for Windows, so if you’ve been using the crappy windows version you’re going to be stuck with it for the foreseeable future. Maybe things will change, but for now there’s absolutely no indication that they will.
This does answer the obvious question of what happens to iOS users who still rock Windows machines. Since macOS Catalina will be taking over device-syncing duties it wasn’t clear what this meant for Windows users that still needed to use the iTunes sync function for whatever reason.
As it turns out nothing is going to change, because of course it isn’t. It’s clearly too hard to just scrap that bit altogether and let people drag and drop files into their iPhone’s folder. It’s not like every other device uses such a feature, after all.
So iTunes is clinging on to life, on the many many Windows machines that exist. Great.
This post originally appeared on Gizmodo UK, which is gobbling up the news in a different timezone.