At its WWDC 2015 keynote yesterday,
Apple revealed the Apple Music
service and confirmed the long-rumoured tidbit about
it also coming to Android. That's pretty
amazing, considering the company in question - but it's not even
the only Android app that Apple is developing right now.
The other one makes a lot more sense in the
mobile wars: Move to iOS is an app that will help users of Android
devicess transfer their data to an iPhone or iPad, as well as find
the iOS equivalents of the apps they use on Android. Now that
sounds like something Apple would do.
According to Apple's iOS 9 preview site, the app will let you move over contacts,
your message history, saved photos and videos, accounts, wallpaper,
DRM-free media, and more. And then it'll point you towards the free
apps you already use that are also on the iOS App Store, and put
the paid apps on your iTunes Wish List.
Apple previously wrote up a guide on how
to do all of this stuff manually, but soon software will be
involved, making it a much more aggressive-seeming ploy. And the
exclamation mark is the note on the screen of the app that says,
"You can recycle this Android phone for free at any Apple Store."
Ouch.
Given its placement on the iOS 9 preview
listing, it seems likely that this app will launch with the new OS
sometime this autumn, making it an ideal companion to
the iPhone 6s or 7, or whichever new
handset Apple releases alongside the OS. And imagine if the Apple
Music app on Android points users towards this app as a friendly
suggestion. We're certainly curious to see how hard Apple pushes
potential new customers towards its hardware.
[Source: Apple via The Verge]