Could also have been a purchase for their licensing or metadata. It sounds like Primephonic has put a lot of work into all of that, and if Apple wants to get into classical then it'd make sense to throw a tiny-by-their-standards amount of money at a known-good metadata set and accompanying licenses for the music.

(Though I agree, it'd be kind of silly for them to not let the people they've acqui-hired keep on working on the "new" app in their domain.)

i also think this is the case, as the user base must be tiny still (esp when looking at the comments here, even classical music fans didn't know about it. i found it through the "inside the score" youtube channel)

100% this.

The existing iOS app is programmed by approx < 2 devs. They have an Android app which Apple will quickly shut down. The infra can be run by < 2 ops too.

I predict most of the dev team will be looking for a new gig soon... shame as they were a great bunch!

>They have an Android app which Apple will quickly shut down.

Why would they do that? Apple Music and AppleTV are both available on Android.

And the original apple music app was based on Beats Music as well! I‘ve heard the theory that they bought Beats for that, and the music industry contacts, which seems wild, but maybe?