It feels like a natural extension of the Apple Watch, especially now that sales are rising and you already have tens of millions of Apple Watch users.
If you ask me, iBooks and podcasts sound like the next logical step. If the current trend of companies like Spotify paying creators to be limited to only their platform keeps up, I can see Apple responding in kind to guard their market share and prevent too many people from flocking to Spotify (which could have an impact on Apple Music subscriber numbers).
I just wonder how a subscription-based podcast with work with third party podcast players like Overcast, or if they would only be playable via the default podcast app. Dithering made it work, but the implementation is a tad clunky, and they are not trying to restrict their podcast to a specific platform, so there’s that too.
Ebooks, well, because Audible is a thing, apparently.
This makes the idea of a service bundle even more appealing, because subscribing to one means being automatically being subscribed to all Apple services (even those like News+ which people normally wouldn’t have tried on their own), which could in turn make it even more unappealing to try any other third party service and increase the stickiness of the Apple ecosystem overall.
