No, the poster is setting up the same tired argument that is raised since the iPod came out: it's not a USB media device out of the box. That is by design, and likely for reasons other than to "restrict our freedomz!". I don't want to use a file manager to organize my music, I'll take an iPod/iPhone, please. You may feel differently, so you might want to take a look at the fine music players on the market. Or just suck it up and install the app on your iPhone.
I want to hook up an iPad to my laptop - FOR FREE - and be able to copy 2GB movies to it whenever I want, with 2 clicks or less. I say iPad but it's the same, really, for iPhone. I just care more about the iPad here :)
You can do it, but it's in no way straightforward: all sort of cloud services (no, I don't want to send my files over to your servers in Finland to copy things in my living room), making the iPad a WebDAV server (probably the simplest solution but definitely annoying), SMB shares (only seen on the iPad through crappy or paid apps), iTunes (again, crappy solution, a lot more clicks than a real file manager).
I mean, just because Apple (or the media companies Apple does business with) has an agenda to push you can't blame me for bitching at them. After all drag'n'drop file copying between devices was a problem solved 20 years ago. Now I need special "apps" on either my PC or on the iPad (most of them crapware or paid or paid crapware) to connect glorified "iDevices". The just took that option out - there was no technical reason to not have it and just HIDE the entry from newbies.
Add to this the fact that the app market looks so immature that I feel I'm back to DOS shareware land. Few major companies I feel I can trust to not screw me at a low level (I don't care about NSA intrusions, I care about credit cards numbers being leaked out or major security breaches on code no-one has ever reviewed), no well known, mature OSS apps for the main things I do with my device.
Right now installing an app seems a crap shoot.
Anyway, it's all business reasons and not tech reasons, I get it. End of rant :|
Hardly my point. I use spotify because I have a subscription anyway. I just wanted to add some music to my phone so I could test siri and select songs by voice. The stock player is privileged (spotlight integration, Siri integration) in iOS so using a different app isn't an optimal solution.
When I use Android phones I have literally dozens of options to get music to play with the stock player. (copy it from a cloud storage, adb push it to my phone, copy with a simple file explorer, download it from a website or use btsync to sync it automatically)
Apple made a big step when the iPhone/iPad no longer needed a PC to just activate it. And then again a big step to allow OTA updates. I think the next step would be to allow some way to add music without using a dedicated PC.
I know that loading new music onto recent iPods is protected by cryptographic techniques with a similar strength and level of code obfuscation to their DRM scheme. Wouldn't be surprised to find the same is true of the iPhone.
