The iTunes Wish List is Dead (For Real This Time)
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Apple is preparing to drive the final nail into the coffin of its iTunes Wish List feature, once a popular way for users to keep a shopping list of movies and TV shows they were interested in buying or renting.
It’s a move that’s felt inevitable ever since Apple effectively killed off its standalone iTunes Movies and TV Shows apps in tvOS 17.2 a little over two years ago — and the TV-based iTunes Wish List along with it. It wasn’t entirely clear if Apple’s engineers simply missed the fact that sunsetting the standalone iTunes apps on the Apple TV would take the wish lists along with it, or if they hoped nobody would notice, but people did, and Apple was forced to walk that back by returning the lists to users in tvOS 17.3 — with all the content still intact.
Beyond just keeping customers happy, Apple has another incentive to keep these lists alive in some form: they’re filled with content that users have identified as wanted to buy (or rent) from iTunes. There’s money to be made by ensuring that folks still have those reminders in place.
Still, we had to assume that this situation wouldn’t last forever, since the Movies and TV Shows apps on the Apple TV have become an anachronism, continuing to take up space on the Home Screen — even if they’re squirrelled away in a folder — with no real purpose other than to prove access to these legacy wish lists and tell users to go to the TV app for anything else.
Apple TV fans probably want to see these disappear as much as Apple does, but the question remained of what to do with that wish list data. Presumably, Apple decided to work on a migration path, and it seems to have taken this long for it to figure that out and decide to move ahead with it. This week, customers who have used the wish list began receiving emails from Apple to let them know the end of wish lists is nigh. However, the data won’t be lost — you’ll just get it in a PDF file.
This week, Zac Hall at 9to5Mac reported that affected users have begun receiving emails that the legacy iTunes Wish List feature is going away:
Your iTunes Wish List of movies and shows is going away soon and will no longer be accessible. iTunes Wish List is also referred to as Favorites on tvOS. iTunes Wish List feature will no longer be accessible on Apple platforms.
Each email includes a personalized PDF file containing a list of titles in their wish list with links to their entries in the TV app. Apple provides instructions for adding these entries to the “Continue Watching” row, but it’s entirely a manual process done in pretty much the same way you’d add anything to the queue — by finding it and tapping the plus button on the detail page. The links in the PDF file simply provide a shortcut to each item to save you the trouble of searching for it.
Despite being a longtime iTunes customer with heavily-populated wish lists, I have yet to receive this email. Considering what I’ve spent and saved on the iTunes Store over the past two decades, maybe the PDF file is just too big, but it’s more likely this is going out in stages, or perhaps the changes haven’t hit Canada yet.
Speaking of large PDF files, some users have reported that movies take priority, with TV shows being cut off if the list is excessively long. I’d suggest checking whatever you receive carefully if you have a longer wish list stored in the Apple TV apps.
The emails don’t provide any details on when the Wish Lists will actually disappear from the Apple TV, but it’s a safe bet that we’ll see the standalone iTunes Movies and iTunes TV Shows go away at the same time, as the Wish Lists seem to be the only reason they’ve hung around for as long as they have.
It’s worth mentioning that the iTunes Wish Lists in the tvOS iTunes apps (called “Favorites” in the TV Shows app) are unique to those apps. These have never synced beyond the Apple TV, and are distinct from the “Wish List” you’ll find in the iTunes apps — the iTunes Store on the iPhone and iPad and the legacy versions of iTunes on Mac and Windows. That’s why the disappearance of the Apple TV Wish List in tvOS 17.2 was such a problem — there was no other way to access these wish lists except from another Apple TV that hadn’t been updated.
There’s no word on what’s happening to the wish list in the iTunes Store apps, but for now it not only continues to work just fine, but it even provides links to movies and TV shows that were previously saved in it — despite Apple having shut down those sections of the iTunes Store and moved them into the TV app over two years ago — an indication that all the plumbing remains in place behind the scenes, but Apple has merely closed some of the front doors.
