Apple Music App for Android Gains Android Auto Support, Search by Lyrics and More

[MacRumors]

Following the release of iOS 12, which brought a few new Apple Music features, Apple has updated its Apple Music app for Android to introduce feature parity.

Today's update brings support for searching by lyrics, an iOS 12 feature that's designed to let you locate songs and artists using song lyrics rather than a song name.

To use the feature, all you need to do is type in a sentence from the lyrics of a particular song and Apple Music will try to find it. This doesn't work with all songs, but it does work with those that offer lyrics in the Apple Music app.

Apple Music for Android is also gaining the new Artist Pages that were introduced in iOS 12, allowing an artist's music to be played with a single tap, and there's support for the Friends Mix.

Friends Mix is a playlist of songs gathered from the people that you're following on Apple Music. Android users can also discover new music through the inclusion of a new Top 100 list that offers up the daily top 100 songs from countries around the world.

After installing the 2.6.0 update, Android users will also be able to use Apple Music with Android Auto for the first time thanks to new Android Auto support.

Android users can download the Apple Music app from the Google Play store.

Article Link: Apple Music App for Android Gains Android Auto Support, Search by Lyrics and More

 

[mrow]

I know Apple would never release it but I’d love to know how many Android users subscribe to Apple Music.

 

[Dj64Mk7]

I know Apple would never release it but I’d love to know how many Android users subscribe to Apple Music.

Count One!

 

[Peepo]

Google maps on CarPlay and now Apple Music on android auto. What next I wonder.

 

[1050792]

I know Apple would never release it but I’d love to know how many Android users subscribe to Apple Music.

I do.

 

[Agent OrangeZ]

Google maps on CarPlay and now Apple Music on android auto. What next I wonder.

Apple Music on Google Home pls......

 

[m0sher]

Search by lyrics is going to be useful, woohooo.

 

[2010mini]

Google maps on CarPlay and now Apple Music on android auto. What next I wonder.

watchOS for Android??

 

[Delgibbons]

I know Apple would never release it but I’d love to know how many Android users subscribe to Apple Music.

I do. Handy for accessing my music purchases from my old Ipod touch from back in the day and I subscribe for the music service too.

 

[djcerla]

Google maps on CarPlay and now Apple Music on android auto. What next I wonder.

Eric Schmidt on Apple’s board. Oh, wait...

 

[djcode24]

the only thing that still doesnt work in android auto mode is playlist folder navigation.

 

[Pirate515]

I do. Handy for accessing my music purchases from my old Ipod touch from back in the day and I subscribe for the music service too.

I do as well. I do have MBP, iPhone and iPad, but I also have Google Pixel 2 XL. So for syncing purposes, plus given the fact that Apple has more tracks in their store compared to competition such as Google Play Music, Amazon, Spotify, etc. I think there would be a few takers, even among those who may want nothing to do with Apple hardware of their other products.

 

[Infinite Vortex]

I know Apple would never release it but I’d love to know how many Android users subscribe to Apple Music.

Count in another one.

 

[Pangalactic]

I know Apple would never release it but I’d love to know how many Android users subscribe to Apple Music.

Me as well. It's a bit less polished then the iOS version and freezes or crashes sometimes, but 99% of a time does a great job.

 

[atoqir]

I am still waiting for the headline ‘Apple Music releases full fledged webplayer, finally a good music streaming on 91 percent for all the desktop users out there’

 

[dennysanders]

I am still waiting for the headline ‘Apple Music releases full fledged webplayer, finally a good music streaming on 91 percent for all the desktop users out there’

what's wrong with iTunes?

 

[sharleyP]

what's wrong with iTunes?

It just doesn’t work reliably. For personal use I have an iPhone and a MacBook, but at work I use a PC. I tried to use Apple Music with iTunes on Windows and it behaves badly. Just to start - it is painfully slow. It randomly drops connection and breaks in the middle of a song. Or doesn’t load at all - the page “For You” is blank etc. Restart does not always help. And what’s funnier - when I click “close” button the app just closes the window and it’s still running in the background. The only way to close it and restart is to go Ctrl+Alt+Del and manually kill the process.

All of the above happened to me really often - I’d say every day or every other day.
The only solution I’ve found was to switch to Spotify. Unfortunately.

 

[atoqir]

what's wrong with iTunes?

Is that a joke?

Have you used it on Windows? It is terrrrrrible. I have a beefy gaming PC and a development laptop for work and everything laaaaaaags. Even quickly browsing or searching for a song takes like 20 while on Spotify, YouTube music, Deezer takes one. The font aliasing is horrible on a 4K screen with 125 percent magnification.

I tried creating a new smaller library and same issues. The features like iCloud Library and management are best in class. Only the UI and performance is horrible and unreliable on PC.

Also I still don’t get why Apple didn’t mimic Spotify Connect to contine playing or send audio to other devices while literally every other app has handoff
[doublepost=1537423668][/doublepost]

It just doesn’t work reliably. For personal use I have an iPhone and a MacBook, but at work I use a PC. I tried to use Apple Music with iTunes on Windows and it behaves badly. Just to start - it is painfully slow. It randomly drops connection and breaks in the middle of a song. Or doesn’t load at all - the page “For You” is blank etc. Restart does not always help. And what’s funnier - when I click “close” button the app just closes the window and it’s still running in the background. The only way to close it and restart is to go Ctrl+Alt+Del and manually kill the process.

All of the above happened to me really often - I’d say every day or every other day.
The only solution I’ve found was to switch to Spotify. Unfortunately.

I have all the same issues.

I need iCloud library since I listen to a lot of soundtracks that are not all on streaming. The day YouTube music ports over their 50 000 song locker I might switch over. Spotify is great but their handling of local music is terrible.

I can live with the fact that I need to upload music with iTunes, but just give us a super responsive web app for music. Oh and a super responsive webmail, drive and photo site too because icloud.com performs as good as iTunes...

 

[YaBe]

I know Apple would never release it but I’d love to know how many Android users subscribe to Apple Music.

Count me in,

 

[Phil A.]

I know Apple would never release it but I’d love to know how many Android users subscribe to Apple Music.

The play store shows 10 million downloads so somewhere between zero and 10 million active subscribers would be a start, but that still doesn't tell the whole story as there will be some users (such as myself) who use it both on iOS and Android.

I did have a brief flirtation back with Spotify but for all it's faults I still feel Apple Music is the best streaming music service so I went back to it. If it wasn't available on Android, I'd probably go back to Spotify (somewhat reluctantly) so I could use the same service on all my devices

And having said all that, I'd guess it's towards the upper end of that range as Apple apparently see value in continuing development for Android.

 

[Henrar]

The funniest thing about Apple Music on Android Auto is that Youtube Music by Google doesn't support it.

 

[Delgibbons]

Is that a joke?

Have you used it on Windows? It is terrrrrrible. I have a beefy gaming PC and a development laptop for work and everything laaaaaaags. Even quickly browsing or searching for a song takes like 20 while on Spotify, YouTube music, Deezer takes one. The font aliasing is horrible on a 4K screen with 125 percent magnification.

I tried creating a new smaller library and same issues. The features like iCloud Library and management are best in class. Only the UI and performance is horrible and unreliable on PC.

Also I still don’t get why Apple didn’t mimic Spotify Connect to contine playing or send audio to other devices while literally every other app has handoff
[doublepost=1537423668][/doublepost]
I have all the same issues.

I need iCloud library since I listen to a lot of soundtracks that are not all on streaming. The day YouTube music ports over their 50 000 song locker I might switch over. Spotify is great but their handling of local music is terrible.

I can live with the fact that I need to upload music with iTunes, but just give us a super responsive web app for music. Oh and a super responsive webmail, drive and photo site too because icloud.com performs as good as iTunes...

Itunes is a bloated horrific experience....

 

[justafew]

I know Apple would never release it but I’d love to know how many Android users subscribe to Apple Music.

Count me too. But the one thing I use a lot on Apple Music that still doesn’t exist on the Android version is the start Ratings. I use Ratings a lot to build and manage playlists, but I can’t edit or add any Ratings on the Android app. I have to wait until I get back to a computer with iTunes. Minor inconvenience as I still think Apple Music is the best, especially given the amount of songs I have “uploaded” I can access via Apple Music.

And Smart Playlists are awesome and one thing no other music service can come close to touching. When you can build playlists out of your library with specific genres, excluding certain artists, songs you haven’t listened to in a certain number of days, with a specific star rating (or greater than or less than), with a criteria set on the number of times you have played it, etc. And that’s not even talking about nested rules that can further refine your playlist.

 

[Confuzzeled23]

Now I'm just waiting for an Android TV app for my Sony OLED TV. Unfortunately it runs Android OS for it's smart TV functionality and the only reason I have thought about buying an Apple TV is to listen to music on the TV.

 

[Dj64Mk7]

Talking about YouTube Music... what keeps me from that service (and really, any others besides Apple Music) is the terrible audio quality and no gapless playback. (And smaller things, like how when you skip to the next song while the current song is paused, it will automatically start playing the next song.) 128kbps just doesn't cut it when we have Apple Music's best-in-the-business 256kbps VBR files that take up less than 2% more space than Spotify's 320kbps files. How does Apple manage this? (not a rhetorical question)
[doublepost=1537465387][/doublepost]

Now I'm just waiting for an Android TV app for my Sony OLED TV. Unfortunately it runs Android OS for it's smart TV functionality and the only reason I have thought about buying an Apple TV is to listen to music on the TV.

Why not just buy a Sonos or Google Home Max speaker?
[doublepost=1537465645][/doublepost]

Smart Playlists are awesome and one thing no other music service can come close to touching. When you can build playlists out of your library with specific genres, excluding certain artists, songs you haven’t listened to in a certain number of days, with a specific star rating (or greater than or less than), with a criteria set on the number of times you have played it, etc. And that’s not even talking about nested rules that can further refine your playlist.

I will agree that smart playlists are amazing, but I'll also add that my parameters don't seem to be applied anymore (Love/Dislike) and that the sorting is all sorts of wack now, with some tracks randomly being at the very top/bottom and only 60% being properly alphabetized. That's on both my iPhone and Android; everything with smart playlists seems to be working fine (for now at least) on my Mac.