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Spotify’s Android app has been in need of an update for some time — especially when compared to its beautiful Windows Phone offering. Fortunately, the wait is over, and the new version is much improved: it’s cleaner, more visual, and wants to help you find as much new music as possible.
In fact, the whole experience seems to be inspired by the Facebook app: it relies on a slide-out navigation system, accessed from the top left corner, and generally looks much cleaner than its predecessor as a result. Elsewhere, there’s an increased emphasis on visuals, with high-resolution artist images and album artwork plastered generously across the app.
There’s also more emphasis on music discovery, both through friends’ profile pages and playlists, as well as Spotfy’s own recommendations. There should be Last FM scrobbling up-and-running by the time the app lands in Google Play, too.
All in, it’s much improved — though we’re disappointed it’s not quite as beautiful as the Windows Phone app. Now there’s just the hotly anticipated iPad version to wait for. The new version of Spotify for Android should be available in Google Play later today ”soon”.
Update: The app will be launching on Google Play “soon” but in the meantime, if you just can’t wait, you can grab the preview direct from Spotify. Check out Spotify’s previews blog for details.
I wonder if they will start supporting the Galaxy Nexus. We have to keep installing over and over to work.
From the pics above I’d say it has ICS support, I haven’t used Spotify on Android (so can’t comment on problems) as I am still using the free Rara account given to me by Giz UK (Thanks again Guys). Maybe when that dies I’ll see what the alternatives are like.
They say on the website that they don’t support the Galaxy Nexus, I have complained to their tech support but they just advise to uninstall and install again. I find it funny, since the Nexus should be the base for every developer, at least that is what I think.
The current app was made in the cupcake days (If I remember correctly) and seen as they have been working on this new android app I highly doubt it would have been their top priority. Fully expect the new app to support the Galaxy Nexus, if it doesn’t then you have cause to complain.
I hope so, we should find out soon enough.
They’ve made a preview available, probably worth checking out.
It is working for now, I will wait the new release. Thanks Sam.
Exactly this. If they’re already a good chunck through the new app’s development cycle, it’s unlikely they’re gonna perform maintenance on the current app unless it’s very urgent. The Galaxy Nexus hardly sold in droves, so it’s going to be low priority for them as they will just build support in the new app.
That said, Spotify works perfectly at the moment on my ICS device…
I use this App a lot and have had it since moving to android about 3 years ago and on symbian before that so I thought I’d give my thoughts for anyone looking at upgrading bare in mind this is running on a samsung GS2 (still on 2.3 as I’m on t-mob … sigh)
Some stuff I’m a bit disappointed with although this is still a preview so fingers crossed:
- still no folder support (should be coming before it hit’s google play apparantly)
- widget is gone? (I’ve always had it on the first page of my home screen so kinda bummed about this)
- playlists are doubled up under the auspice of ‘downloaded’ and ‘all’ I don’t see why if a playlist is downloaded it needs to be listed again under all just seems stupid, old way was much better!
- no ability to choose whether to store tracks on internal memory or SD card and no way to clear saved data to do so (I’ve got about 10Gig of spotify data on my internal storage and would prefer to have that on my SD now)
- still can’t reorder playlists
- hardware menu button doesn’t work
- preview doesn’t have last fm
- You can no longer tell if a track is connected to a local file
-still no landscape mode
- I don’t have a tablet but apparantly the UI isn’t tablet optomised
on the up side
- interface is much slicker
- starring a song doesn’t make it crash anymore
- search is much faster
- can now rename playlists
- can now queue in a now playing list however there’s no way to see the Queue
- music discovery is much better
- artist pages are much better
- higher quality streams/downloads available – but buggy a manual delete of the cache files is needed in order to take advantage of it