Drag and Drop

I recently sat at a table of friends and the three Android users out numbered myself, the lone iPhone user. I asked one of them why he switched from a iPhone 4 to the new Galaxy S3 and besides the main reason being the screen size, he also said he didn't like iTunes – he just liked dragging things onto his device. I asked my friends how they keep their music organized and they said they just drag it into a big music folder and the device reads the metadata. I didn't want to geek out on them so I didn't ask them what happens when the metadata is wrong and how they add cover art, but in my head, iTunes was always pretty straightforward after I got out of my "I hate iTunes" phase.

However, it seems it's an either you "get it" or you don't kind of application and some people just prefer not using an additional program.

Syncing & Files

On another incident, I bumped into a co-worker who has a Galaxy Tab 10.1 on my break and she said she was going to switch from the iPhone to the S3 as well (she didn't really know the name initially, but she said she wanted "that latest one"). I was surprised because she is around middle-age and I always had the impression that in general the older demographic would prefer the simplicity of iOS.

My co-worker also told me how her computer died along with all her songs and how every time she plugs her iPhone into a computer, it asks to erase all her songs. She told me that it seems Android is less "limited" and when I asked her if she meant the fact that you can customize keyboards and widgets, she just said "you can just plug it in an drag files in".

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It seems a lot of people are confused about iTunes and why it is needed. For myself, I enjoy using iTunes on my Mac because I like my files organized and it lets me modify and sort by metadata and easily add cover art to my songs; but for others, it just another program (and a slow one I heard, if you use Windows) they have to download and the only way to get music onto your device.

I know my evidence is anecdotal, but I've heard the majority of iDevice users I know have complained at least once about the ability to sync a device to only one computer and not being able to use an iDevice as mass storage. Also, it's pretty shocking that all my Android-using friends mentioned iTunes as one of the things that "limits" an iDevice.

I grew up in the 90's so I was still young when the new iPod came out in 2001. I don't know what the environment was back then, but it seems iTunes was made for another era. Also, maybe the past DRM issues prevented Apple from letting iPods sync with multiple computers. However, in today's age, this doesn't make sense anymore. More and more people are learning to use computers and dragging and dropping is quite basic. I think Apple really needs to let users sync with multiple computers without erasing the entire device (how does that even make sense?) and let iDevices be filled with content by iTunes AND drag and drop.

Anyone else switched from iOS because of iTunes. I'd love to hear your thoughts.