by Dan Moren
Eddy Cue on Android version of Apple Music
TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino talked to Eddy Cue about the launch of the Apple Music app for Android:
He makes the case that the best experience for an Android user would be to feel familiar with Apple Music right on launch. “We wanted customers on Android to naturally be able to use it – what they’ve learned and how they interact is common. Things as simple as [that] the share icon looks like an Android share icon; the menu structure being where it is; these are things that most Android customers are familiar with. We wanted to make sure that they felt very familiar with Apple Music when they sat down to use it.”
The only other examples I can think of where Apple devoted this much time to developing an app for another platform are iTunes and Safari for Windows. Apple Music is much more akin to the former, in my thinking: given that content is platform agnostic, Apple wanted to appeal to as many people as possible. Safari, by comparison–the infamous “glass of ice water for people in hell” (Whoops, that was in fact iTunes.)–seemed more like an attempt to validate the browser’s existence, by upping the installed base so that it was a viable alternative.
In the case of Apple Music, there’s a bonus: as Panzarino points out, with switchers from Android providing a big section of Apple’s potential customer base, getting them into the ecosystem is a smart move. That said, I’m not sure Apple Music is in and of itself a good enough product to trigger the kind of halo effect that other Apple products, such as the iPod, have had in the past.
Updated at 2:32 p.m. Eastern.