An update to Google Play Music has been slowly rolling out from Google, but there aren’t any significant user-facing changes. Why’s that news? Well, as always, the team at Android Police have torn the APK file apart to see what goodies they can find hidden inside Google’s code, and they’ve found some hints of what’s to come.
Of course, because these features are not implemented yet, there’s no guarantee they will be in a future update. That said, more often than not, these features do come to pass … but nothing in life is certain. So, with that behind us, let’s look at what is likely to come:
- Quality settings for playing on WiFi and Mobile which you can set separately. If you’ve got a huge data inclusion, you might want high quality on mobile. If you’ve got a miserly cap, but still want access to music on the fly, then a medium or lower quality might be more appropriate. You can set the same options for WiFi connectivity, to limit your bandwidth usage if your home or work WiFi isn’t especially generous.
- Autoplay, which – as the name implies – will allow the Play Music app to start playing music when the app is started. It’s unknown how this might work, but one assumes it’ll begin playing music where it left off, or if no song was playing before, it might choose one from your library to kick off with. One could imagine machine learning taking a role here, to pick the best song for your current location/time/habits.
That’s about it; the new update to version 7.1.4118-1 is rolling out now via the Play Store, though we’ve not seen it here yet. You can grab it from the Play Store when it’s available, below, or from APK Mirror today.
Let’s hope they upgrade the Wear companion app. It used to be that when you said “OK Google …. play The Kaiser Chiefs” it would play their stuff in GPM. But for ages now, it opens some other audio app – TuneIn Radio in my case. The other day I asked it to play Muse and I got some Russian radio station FFS!!
All I want is an option to stop Google Play from autoplaying and stopping the content I’m already listening to when it thinks the bluetooth in the car connects, typically 5 to 10 minutes after it connected and I’ve been listening to a podcast.