If you’re into serious music, you’ll remember Apple’s acquisition of Primephonic last summer. This was great news for Apple Music users, as it meant that the classical catalog on the service would expand substantially, but it was also good news for Primephonic users, as those from Cupertino said that Apple Music Classical, A specific app will arrive soon that will allow access to the service’s entire catalog of classical music.

To be more precise, and as we told you at the time, the initial plans were to start bringing Primephonic content to Apple Music, both albums and well-known playlists of the defunct service. In addition, however, they also said that a new app, Apple Music Classical, would be released sometime in 2022, which would provide access exclusively to Apple Music’s classical music catalog (both the Primephonic catalog and the one already available on the service earlier), which would also reproduce the functions that the Primephonic application had.

Although classical music in general is a niche market (broad but niche), many of its consumers are particularly discerning, something Primephonic was well aware of, having over the years been able to satisfy this high level perfectly. demand and therefore had great prestige among these users. So all indications were that Apple was fully aware of this circumstance and therefore considered acting accordingly and providing an exclusive experience.

However, 2022 is coming to an end there seems to be no indication that Apple Music Classical will materialize in those two weeks. And just that Apple just released iOS 16.2, there’s no sign of this new app, and the beta version of iOS 16.3 that’s already released to developers doesn’t seem to include it either. Of course, this is not a definitive sign, but unless Apple has reserved a surprise as a Christmas present, it seems that it will be necessary to wait until 2023 … at least.

And why am I even saying that? Because as rightly said in The Verge today, there are three most viable options when it comes to Apple Music Classical:

It is possible that, as with Freeform, Apple Music Classical will not be integrated into the new version of the operating system (although it requires it) and instead be published as a “standalone” app and downloadable from the App Store. This actually makes a lot of sense, as it’s certainly not a service that most iOS users want, so its default inclusion seems rather pointless. And that’s exactly what I meant when Apple could reserve a Christmas surprise for us, because there’s still room for it to be released during these holidays.

Another option is that the release of this application has been delayedeither because it is not a priority for the company’s development teams, or because despite the effort to meet the deadline, a problem may have arisen during its development. If that’s the case, I’m more inclined to the first of the two possibilities, because during this year 2022, Apple has really introduced several improvements to Apple Music, such as the broadcasting of concerts, the functions of lyrics in the web interface or Apple Music Sing, among others. The emphasis seems to be on the core service, so Apple Music Classical may have been pushed down the to-do list.

And the third possibility is that at some point Apple changed its mind and decided that there would be no specific application for classical music. This would undoubtedly be bad news for all the users who have been waiting for this since the Primephonic acquisition. There could be an explanation for this decision, but I fear that in that case it would not be well received by these users.