macOS 10.15's standalone Music, Podcasts & TV app details & icons revealed

A report on Wednesday reinforced evidence that the next major version of macOS will have standalone Music, Podcasts, and TV apps, also giving a glimpse at new icons.

The apps should indeed be coded using Marzipan, Apple's technology for porting iPad apps to the Mac. The icons for the Podcasts and TV apps use familiar imagery, simply stylized with macOS' round design.

Accompanying the new apps should be a redesigned Books app with a sidebar similar to Apple News, and a narrower title bar with Library, Book Store, and Audiobook Store tabs. When in the Library tab the sidebar will present users with all their collections, including custom and predefined ones.

iTunes will allegedly remain around, but it's unclear what purpose it will have under the new app scheme. It may be necessary for device sync purposes.

The new claims come from 9to5Mac, but strongly echo those made by developer Steve Troughton-Smith on Apr. 5.

Many Mac and Windows users have complained that even with the App Store gone, iTunes is still needlessly bloated. That may be holding back its performance, particularly on Windows, and creating confusion for new users simply trying to find Apple Music or video purchases.

Apple is likely to showcase macOS 10.15 at WWDC 2019 in June, then launch the final software this fall.

12 Comments

Joe Piervincenti 26 comments · 6 Years

About 5 years ago

I’m hoping iTunes stays around, it’s much easier to use iTunes when you’re looking at weekly featured sales, also the Wish List functionality isn’t in the TV app, although I’m sure it will be eventually!

gutengel 363 comments · 7 Years

Let see if Apple is stepping up their game on Podcasts since they are slowly loosing ground. Also improving the music app would be welcome, some people have big libraries of music and iTunes used to be THE APP for managing that. iTunes is becoming dumber and dumber deleting features. I still have around 15% of my music library not available on my phone because they are still figuring out how mix apple music with your existing library, very frustrating >:(

StrangeDays 12962 comments · 8 Years

gutengel said:

Let see if Apple is stepping up their game on Podcasts since they are slowly loosing ground. Also improving the music app would be welcome, some people have big libraries of music and iTunes used to be THE APP for managing that. iTunes is becoming dumber and dumber deleting features. I still have around 15% of my music library not available on my phone because they are still figuring out how mix apple music with your existing library, very frustrating >:(

Huh? My existing music library and Apple Music additions to it are mixed just fine, no issues. What are you referring to?

adbe 30 comments · 7 Years

gutengel said:

Let see if Apple is stepping up their game on Podcasts since they are slowly loosing ground. Also improving the music app would be welcome, some people have big libraries of music and iTunes used to be THE APP for managing that. iTunes is becoming dumber and dumber deleting features. I still have around 15% of my music library not available on my phone because they are still figuring out how mix apple music with your existing library, very frustrating >:(

Still? I tried out Apple music about six months into its life, and it totally trashed my iTunes Match library, and Apple support were mostly useless. I swore I'd peronally never touch it again, but I kinda assumed Apple would have worked out most of the kinks by now.

AppleInsider said:
iTunes will allegedly remain around, but it's unclear what purpose it will have under the new app scheme. It may be necessary for device sync purposes.
Presumably the same purpose it serves on iOS? It's the music store.