Apple is shuttering one in all its lesser-known video apps on the App Retailer because it seeks to consolidate extra of its content material into its major TV app.
Practically twelve years in the past, Apple unveiled iTunes Film Trailers, a free iPhone and iPad app that enables customers to entry and examine an unique assortment of HD film previews straight on their units — a necessary characteristic in an period when many trailers on web sites wouldn’t play correctly in Apple’s Safari browser as a consequence of its lack of Flash help.
As I wrote on the time, the iTunes Film Trailers app additionally allows you to see clips and featurettes for each main Hollywood movies and impartial cinema, together with high-res photographs and even a year-long calendar of film releases and the place they’d be taking part in and when.
In its preliminary inception, you could possibly even purchase film tickets straight within the app, though that didn’t work with each theatre, and in some instances, it was later changed with hyperlinks to different ticketing apps equivalent to Fandango as these turned extra in style on their very own. Within the early days, Apple TV help took the type of AirPlay to the massive display, though Apple later added a local Apple TV app.
Though iTunes Film Trailers has been kicking round since 2011, it hasn’t been up to date since late 2017, and it solely ever acquired 16 comparatively minor updates in complete, most of which have been “minor efficiency and stability enhancements” so as to add help for newer iOS variations.
Mockingly, it looks as if iTunes Film Trailers way back turned the very sort of “abandonware” Apple needs to wash up from the App Retailer. Final 12 months, Apple notified builders that it will purge apps that haven’t been up to date in three years and didn’t “meet a minimal obtain threshold.”
Whereas its personal film trailers app clearly qualifies on the primary level, it’s onerous to consider that the second hasn’t additionally come into play, contemplating that the majority of us have forgotten it even exists. Based on Apple, that threshold is apps which have “not been downloaded in any respect or extraordinarily few instances throughout a rolling 12-month interval.”
Alongside the app, Apple additionally nonetheless maintains a film trailers web site at https://trailers.apple.com/ that includes a shockingly old-school format that’s harking back to the iTunes Retailer circa 2011 — across the identical time that the iTunes Film Trailers app launched.
Nevertheless, as MacRumors just lately found, each the trailers app and web site now have a distinguished banner promoting that “Apple TV app is the brand new house of iTunes Film Trailers.”
For most folk, tapping or clicking on that banner does nothing but. Presumably, it is going to finally redirect to the TV app, however the brand new trailer part hasn’t appeared for everybody, particularly these outdoors the US.
Some people on Reddit have reported seeing a brand new trailers banner seem within the Retailer part of the TV app, but it surely appears to be hit-and-miss for now.
The consolidation of Motion pictures and TV present trailers into the TV app isn’t notably stunning. If something, it’s superb that it’s taken Apple this lengthy to do it. Apple launched the TV app in 2016 with the aim of constructing it the central hub for all streaming content material. By the next 12 months, iTunes Film Trailers was dying on the desk, but it’s taken Apple practically 5 years to include that into its principal TV app. In fact, all we have to do is take a look at the design of its iTunes Film Trailers web site to grasp how low-priority this explicit initiative has been for Apple.
Nonetheless, iTunes Film Trailers stays on the App Retailer for now, and it’s a free obtain, so it is likely to be value grabbing it to take a peek at one in all Apple’s extra obscure apps from yesteryear.