36 PCWorld MAY 2020NEWS KILLED BY APPLE
with Apple Music. It’s still better than any of
the AI-generated stations on Spotify, and if
Apple ever added it to its own music service,
it would instantly add a million more
subscribers.TEXTURE
Texture might not have been as popular as
Beats Music, but it was one of the best ways
to subscribe and read magazines on Android
phones before Apple closed its doors (go.
pcworld.com/cdor). With more than five
million downloads and hundreds of titles from
Condé Nast, Time, and many others, Texture
was something of the Netflix for magazines,
offering an all-you-can-read subscription
service with powerful search, sorting, and
sharing. When Apple bought Texture, it left
nothing in its place, as Apple News+ is onlywas the best way to search for apps, and it
was on the cusp of exploding (in fact, Verizon
had just inked a deal [go.pcworld.com/vrsh]
for its own Android search to be powered by
Chomp) until Apple gobbled it up in early
2012 (go.pcworld.com/chby). Google’s own
search has gotten a lot better, but we’d be
lying if we said we didn’t still miss Chomp
when we can’t find something.BEATS MUSIC
Beats Music was short-lived, lasting only from
January 2014 to November 2015, but it
remains one of the bright spots (go.pcworld.
com/bspt) in the streaming music world.
Along with unlimited streaming and offline
listening, the $10-a-month service offered one
thing Spotify and Rdio didn’t: The Sentence
(go.pcworld.com/sent). Like a musical
version of Mad Libs,
Beats tailored its
random songs based
on where you were,
who you were with, and
what you were in the
mood for based on your
multiple-choice
responses. But all that
went away when Apple
bought the company
(go.pcworld.com/btby)
for a cool $3.2 billion,
shut down the music
service, and replaced itApple is reportedly working on a news subscription service that will be
integrated with Apple News.