macOS 10.15 may launch standalone music and podcast apps

At the spring conference in late March, Apple announced that it will soon launch a new Apple TV App on the Mac. This naturally raises the discussion about whether Apple will introduce other media applications to the Mac. If they do, then iTunes is likely to be split into separate apps, and will no longer be Apple’s multimedia platform.

Recently, developer Steve Troughton-Smith disclosed that there is convincing evidence that Apple is developing new apps of music, podcasts  and perhaps books for macOS,  together with TV apps, to constitute a native standalone application for macOS.

The new book app will have a sidebar similar to the news app on Mac, as well as a narrower title bar with three tabs: library, bookstore, and audiobook store. On the library tab, the sidebar lists the user’s books, audiobooks, pdfs, and other collections, including customized books.

New music, podcasts, and TV apps will use the same Marzipan technology as the stock, voice memo apps for Mac. The main function of this technology is to parallelly port the iPad app to a Mac without changing too much code. In addition, the existing Apple Book App is likely to be redesigned with UIKit.

Developers said Apple will launch these standalone apps in the next release, e.g. the macOS 10.15 update.

As the standalone version of the Apple Media app join the Mac, people would ask: So what about iTunes? It is said that because iTunes can also simultaneously manage phone data, macOS will keep it until they update the solution to replace it.