It's not that the system integration is so wonderful, it's that they make it extremely difficult to work outside of it for no reason.
A few years ago I had a friend who wanted a song put on her iphone. I've never used one but I assumed I could do exactly what I've done with every other phone/MP3 player in the universe and just connect it to my laptop via USB and move the file over to some folder called "music" or something. Nope. Needs Itunes. I fire up a VM and install itunes, she has to log into everything and authorize the phone for that machine (with a warning that she can only do this so many times) and then I was able to get the file on her phone but not before it synced her entire library onto my machine (wtf). A few days later her friend is over and she wants the same song on her phone. I still have the VM with itunes installed so we give it a try and it wipes every song on her phone. The whole thing was 100% obnoxious and unnecessary. Really put me off of Apple when every other product "Just Works" while apple requires you to jump through insane hoops for basic functionality the moment you dare to Think Different and do something in a way other than exactly how they want you do things
When was this? Because almost exactly the same story is what stopped me from moving into the Apple ecosystem, around 2010.
The only difference was that the second, wiped phone was an empty "dev" phone, thankfully. It then caused Apple to ask for a series of upgrades to develop for, starting with XCode and ending with my MacBook Pro.
I thought it couldn't have been more than 3-4 years ago, but now you've got me doubting that. I also couldn't say which iphone it was or if it was up to date. I did pull down the what was the current version of itunes at least. Now I kinda wish I hadn't deleted the VM.
Just ask Siri to play that song? Or search for it in the music app? Or was it from some Indy Band which only publishes on its own website? Then yeah, best bet to get it into a iPhone would be a browser with a download manager and Files App support. (iOS 13 will add a download manager to Safari)
The MP3 was a cool solo I recorded that my friend wanted to bring to her singing coach, but it could have been anything. An MP3 from some random CD that's never been available on the itunes, or maybe just one she wasn't interested in buying even if it were available. What you choose to listen to on your devices isn't any of Apple's business.
Streaming isn't a solution for getting media on a device either. It's a nice convenience in a lot cases, but because you're dependent on someone else to make the content available, and someone else to carry it, streaming is always uncertain and you should never assume it'll be available to you even when it has been in the past. As much as I love streaming media, it can't beat having a DRM free local copy you can keep, copy, convert, etc.
The point though is that getting an MP3 on a popular cell phone at any point over the last 3 years shouldn't be complicated. It shouldn't involve logging into accounts, needing to install bloated and intrusive software (itunes installed a service to always run in the background and set itself to start every time the OS was started) or syncing entire musical libraries (and god knows what else) anywhere. It should have been a drag and drop operation, but the internet is full of horror stories about people losing their music collections, collections being merged with other people's libraries, and requests for itunes alternatives just so people can get media onto their expensive devices.
I'm sure if she only ever used an apple computer with apple's itunes software always running on it, and no one else but her ever used it, and she paid for every piece of media she ever put on her device by using the itunes store everything would have worked wonderfully, but any deviation from that very narrow 100% apple-everything set up turns even the simplest things (like putting an MP3 on a cell phone) into an ordeal with 100% unnecessary apple-imposed complications and roadblocks.
The fact that it would have actually been easier (and probably faster) for me to install and setup a web server to host the file so that she (if she had the right browser) could download it to her phone really shows how fucked up the entire process is.
It's trivial to add an .mp3 (or, as I prefer, .m4a) to iTunes and have it sync to your phone. And that's really the model: files of certain types are handled by certain apps (on the mobile device and the computer, respectively), and sync is handled by those, as well. It makes things very simple, convenient, and consistent, and allows for rich metadata, without having to deal with the filesystem (which is really not good enough for that).
> I'm sure if she only ever used an apple computer with apple's itunes software always running on it,
That's not required. Macs come with iTunes, and on a PC you can install it. An iPhone is not a hard disk, but a computer with its own operating system, and you need dedicated software to communicate with it, imagine that.
> and no one else but her ever used it,
That's not required. You can have multiple accounts on your Mac easily, and you can also share music by putting it into a shared folder and creating respective libraries, which manage the metadata (rating, last heard, etc.) for each user independently.
> and she paid for every piece of media she ever put on her device by using the itunes store
That's not required. Most of my iTunes library is ripped from my old CDs (when iTunes came out, the motto was "Rip. Mix. Burn."). You can trivially add audio in a variety of formats (and if a format is not accepted, transcode it using eg ffmpeg).
> any deviation from that very narrow 100% apple-everything set up
Well, as outlined, it is rather special circumstances that make it cumbersome. The fundamental assumption, though, is that you get media from your computer to your mobile device using dedicated software, and I agree that that's problematic: not so much the "dedicated software" part, I have no beef with that, but you should be able to add an .mp3 or .epub to the respective library on the mobile device directly. I hope Apple addresses that without destroying the ease of use and powerful metadata we have now.
> An iPhone is not a hard disk, but a computer with its own operating system, and you need dedicated software to communicate with it, imagine that.
Lol so I guess my Android phone isn't a computer with its own OS, since I can just plug it into a computer and copy over whatever files I want without bloatware, or, even better, plug in an external drive and copy over files to my phone.
This rationale of answering "I don't want to use Apple's BS ecosystem" with "Just use Apple's ecosystem" with a side order of "you luddite this is how technology works" snide is so sadly typical of people entrenched in the Apple ecosystem.
A few years ago I had a friend who wanted a song put on her iphone. I've never used one but I assumed I could do exactly what I've done with every other phone/MP3 player in the universe and just connect it to my laptop via USB and move the file over to some folder called "music" or something. Nope. Needs Itunes. I fire up a VM and install itunes, she has to log into everything and authorize the phone for that machine (with a warning that she can only do this so many times) and then I was able to get the file on her phone but not before it synced her entire library onto my machine (wtf). A few days later her friend is over and she wants the same song on her phone. I still have the VM with itunes installed so we give it a try and it wipes every song on her phone. The whole thing was 100% obnoxious and unnecessary. Really put me off of Apple when every other product "Just Works" while apple requires you to jump through insane hoops for basic functionality the moment you dare to Think Different and do something in a way other than exactly how they want you do things