We spotted earlier this month that Google intends on replacing the Google Play Music brand with the YouTube Music brand. In true Google fashion, they have allowed both apps to exist simultaneously, have different feature sets and have provided no road map towards feature parity and eventual replacement.
This week on the YouTube Blog, the YouTube Music team officially announced that the YouTube Music app will be replacing the Google Play Music app on all new Android 10 and Android 9 devices going forward. That means that Google Play Music will not be installed on your new Android devices going forward but YouTube Music will be.
So this must mean that YouTube Music has finally achieved feature parity yes? No. Not even close.
While the feature set is growing and support for things like local file playback were recently announced, there are still a few key features missing including the most important of all, access to your online vault of uploaded music.
One of the big differentiators between Google Play Music and any other music service was the ability to upload your own music library and then have free access to your own music via the cloud. This enabled two important pieces of functionality: firstly the ability to access you legitimately owned music on the cloud without a subscription, and secondly, it gave you access to music not included in Google’s subscription service.
Despite Google’s promises that all Google Play Music features would migrate into YouTube Music, the time it is taking and the fact the YouTube app is officially replacing Google Play Music on Android is making us worried.
Why? We’re worried that that promise won’t be kept and that will just be another example of Google dumping on their most loyal and long-running customers.
However, Google Play Music isn’t going away yet, so if you still need access to that personal vault then you can grab the app from the Play Store and you’ll be streaming your tunes in minutes.
