It seems like only last week that Moscone West was filled with developers keen to learn more about Android, ChromeOS and Google products, but today it’s Apple’s turn with their World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). The reason WWDC is of any interest to us is that their newly announced Apple Music streaming service will be coming to Android later this year.
Officially, the service will arrive worldwide on June 30, though international rollouts are always finicky it is something Apple can do fairly well.. The service will arrive with a 3-month introductory offer, and then cost US$9.99 per month, offering streaming music from Apple’s admittedly fairly major music catalogue – as well as your own ripped CD’s. The service also offers a new radio station called ‘Beats 1’, which offers music selected by popular DJs (Zane Lowe in Los Angeles, Ebro Darden in New York and Julie Adenuga in London).
The $10 per month plan will also be joined by a $15 per month ‘Family Sharing plan’ though seems to be tied into their Apple iCloud account.
The service will come to Android phones according to Apple, though this would conceivably include tablets as well – I wouldn’t bother asking for Android TV, Auto or Wear at this stage.
We’ll soon see how good it is when it goes up against the incumbent streaming services such as Pandora, Rdio, Spotify and of course Google Play Music.
Are you going to try out Apple Music?
I’d be interested to see if it functions as a standalone itunes music player, similar to how Google Play Music app works. If so this could be good news as the music player on offer for Android have always been weak compared to itunes.
curated playlist, more extensive library and family sharing are the pluses from what I can see
“Family Plan requires iCloud Family Sharing” 🙁
from what I understand, iCloud family sharing is free? what’s bad with it?
The Apples are falling further from the tree 🙂
I’ll try it out. it has a locker aspect, which puts it ahead of some competitors. I guess the question for me will be about playlists, something Google Play isn’t great at.
Don’t feed the dirty beast that is Apple. No good will come from it.
Well as it is I’m a mixed OS household (iPad and Apple TV, along with Windows PCs and Android phones and some googlecast devices) and well no streaming service so far is perfect. I guess what I’d like is something like Google Play Music, with Spotify’s playlists.
This is ground breaking news, not the music service but this will be the first application other than iTunes/icloud that apple has ever made for another os! And the first android application its ever made!!
Pretty sure that quicktime player was an Apple product too! Widely used back in the day.
quicktime while it could be a standalone product was really a bundled product that came with iTunes.
Well once iTunes was a thing. Quicktime predates that quite a bit.
Yep. I used quicktime quite a bit to watch .mov files in the Win XP and possibly earlier days. Didn’t even know about the existence of iTunes. Quicktime was certainly not advertised as part of it either way. It was presented as it’s own thing. Apple even had their own Movie trailer thing going on, with all of them showing in Quicktime.
I still have a few .MOV files. Among them are the VR MOV of the old Apple Icon Garden, a .MOV of the ‘1984’ ad, and the UnrealTournament promo video.
The launch of QuickTime for Windows goes back to before Win95.
It is that old. The earliest version I got to try was QuickTime 2 for Windows 3.x, in early 1995.
With the launch of Quicktime 5, it began being bundled with iTunes.
Its amazing that the love of proving someone wrong is overshadowed by my message. Apple rarely releases products for other vendors OS. There have been some rare examples but like the music one they are only to drive $$$$ into the apple land.
As a android user I won’t even be trying this. Apple is nasty company that doesn’t like to play well with others
If Apple Music provides a better user experience than its Android competitors I’ll switch. I don’t care who makes it. If it is better its better, its better. If they are releasing it to Android it wont be average.
Just because its Apple doesn’t make it evil.