“Earlier this month, Apple brought its Apple Music product into Alphabet’s smartphone ecosystem, with a native Apple Music app for Android,” Andrew Tonner writes for The Motley Fool. “This marks only the second time Apple has launched an Android app, following the cheeky “Move to iOS” app it launched alongside the iPhone 6s’s September debut. Apple Music on Android can be downloaded anywhere in the world except China, but Apple promises a Chinese version in short order as well.”
“Apple is trying to create a beachhead with Android users, with the intention of converting them into Apple device owners. For a point of comparison, think of iTunes for Windows, which helped drive an explosion in iPod sales,” Tonner writes. “Given the news in Apple’s most recent quarterly report that 30% of new iPhone buyers defected from Android, Apple has a great opportunity to continue to siphon away Android users. At the same time, though, Google’s product ecosystem now features multiple on-demand music services, so Apple Music might not prove as appealing as iTunes for Windows. Only time will tell, but Apple’s intent is crystal clear.”
“As for the streaming music space, adding Apple Music to the world’s largest computing ecosystem will ratchet up the pressure on Spotify and Pandora, the two largest players in the space,” Tonner writes. “Apple intends to use Apple Music as a funnel into its ecosystem, which carries consequences for Alphabet, Pandora, Spotify, and more. As we’ve seen repeatedly with Apple’s Hotel California-esque ecosystem, once users check in, they tend never to leave.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Those who settle for fragmandroid are notoriously cheap. Good luck convincing them to pony up $9.99-$14.99/per month, Apple. Regardless, it was an exceedingly nominal amount of effort and cost to port the app to wannabe iPhones. Tipping the relatively few Android settlers who’ll bite — and who are likely the most probable to be considering an upgrade to a real iPhone anyway — is the main motive for offering the app.