Recycled: iTunes, iPod, iPhone.. iChoose?

Something just occurred to me this evening and it has to do with software companies and the monopoly ‘lock in’ tactics that some use.  Microsoft was pulled up over forcing Internet Explorer on people in XP many moons ago now and I’m sure we’re all completely happy with how it eventually turned out, most of us use Firefox and Windows now recognises something called a ‘default browser’.

Fast forward a few years and we’ve seen Apple since day one, ram iTunes down the throat of every ipod owner in the world. This was understandable, after all it’s a portable music player and it only ran on OSX to start with, so it’s ok to force a music player that’s already installed on the operating system along with the device to provide sync support, in fact it totally makes sense.  That is until they released on windows and iTunes wasn’t that great, also for years we’ve all been using Winamp or Windows Media Player and have no desire to switch to iTunes.

The one thing that always turned me off the iPod was iTunes, because on Mac it runs great but on Windows it just blows hard.  I was pretty much given a 20Gb iPod photo a while back and was glad to see Winamp supported sync of the iPod (just like it did my WM6 device), so i didn’t have to piss around with iTunes.  Wishful thinking, i still had to install iTunes just so i can restore and manage updates to my ipod, still.. i can swallow it, it’s a media player it makes sense that the program that controls the syncing is also a media player, right?

Here’s where it gets interesting, Apple released the iPhone, it runs it’s own flavour of iTunes/iPod and along with that is pretty much a fully blown smart phone/PDA.  So heres where i begin to question the integrity of iTunes, when i’m syncing my Calendar, Music, Contacts, Photos, Videos, Software Updates and Applications all through what used to be a media player that i will soon be forced to use 100%, just so i can keep my mobile phone up to date.  This little twist, in my opinion, makes the iTunes/iPhone(ipod) combo way worse than Microsoft ever did with Internet Explorer, yet for someone reason.. no one seems to give a shit? everyone is just copping it and dealing it with.

I shouldn’t have to install a media player that i don’t want to use, just because someone decided the updates for my phone should be delivered through it.  It’s high time Apple released something that synced everything on your phone without using iTunes, perhaps an extended iSync for Windows/OSX with the ability to put files into the devices media player DB without iTunes?

iTunes should be a media player, it should have a ’sync interface’ that any device can use (listen closely apple).  Apple should have some central ’sync software’ for their ipod/iphone collection that acts as a central point between the devices and ANY software (Yeah that’s right apple, not just iTunes).  This way apple can still maintain proprietary code in iTunes and in the way they handle the sync, but still allow people to make decisions for themselves about what software they want to use and not have something they don’t want to use, rammed down their throat.

Oh and please, this isn’t some debate about what’s better and what’s not, because that’s always going to come down to user preference, which is something Apple isn’t providing right now.  Yes i know most other major portable media players are playing the game the same way, but that doesn’t mean they’re playing fairly for us, the consumers.  Perhaps one day people will learn to work together a little to build great things instead of trying to win the war, whether it be a format war, a software war or just good old fashioned war.