iTunes is probably one of the few Apple products that gets a negative review from almost anyone you could ask. The complaints range from “difficult to navigate”, bloated and confusing. The addition of Apple Music to the interface only made it worse. Now, it looks like Apple has taken the first of what will be many steps to rectify the issue. They have restored the sidebar. This is from the Verge:
“The key improvement here is the removal of the drop-down menu on the righthand side of the screen, which previously held all of the options that are now exposed in the lefthand menu. That’s a real help, but the lefthand menu doesn’t take over everything. You’ll still have to search through those top tabs to find major features, like Apple Music and the App Store. (There is, by the way, no one tab that says “Apple Music” — it’s actually a combination of the For You, New, Radio, and Connect tabs.)”
There are rumors of a larger iTunes redesign in the works expect sometime in 2017. Although it could just mean that little changes applied over the period of a year to fix most of these issues.
There are two possible approaches Apple could take to fix iTunes. The first and most extreme is to decouple all of the various parts into individual apps and leave iTunes only for music. This could even involve rebranding the stores. The other is to improve the performance and navigation issues with changes like this one. Either way, a fix for iTunes is badly needed.