Today in San Francisco, Apple announced that Apple Music for Android will be coming in July as part of a larger announcement that the company made around iTunes. The new service is a subscription model where you can pay $9.99 per month (or up to 6 people on the same account for $14.99 per month) will be yet another offering for Android customers but the question will be if it is too late. There are certainly some advantages to having Apple Music on Android devices, namely the Apple catalog of music which is hard to beat.
The announcement is an interesting one as far as timing is concerned. Apple continues to fight on two fronts: Google and Microsoft. Microsoft, for their part, started over a year ago with developing Android and iOS apps and while Google hasn’t exactly been playing nice with Microsoft, they too have been developing apps for iOS (not so much for Windows & Windows Phone). Now Apple has decided to open up their development cycles to competing platforms in hopes of drawing more customers. They also announced, along with Apple Music, that their new programming language Swift will be open sourced.
The second question is why pick on music services? The field is already crowded with Google Play Music, Spotify, Pandora and even Microsoft has Xbox Music available (which is what I personally use). The logic of course is that because it is Apple and iTunes that there will be some folks who want to use their service instead of others being offered. And they will, of course, have more than a few takers, especially those with “mixed device” families.
What do you think? Leave a comment here or on Google+ to let me know if you are interested in this new offering from Apple.
