iPhone Spotify App Review
There was much speculation suggesting that Apple would reject the iPhone Spotify app due to it’s placement as a direct competitor to Apple’s iTunes Store – giving users the ability to access hundreds of thousands of tunes without having to pay for them individually. However, after a profit sharing deal was settled with Apple, the Spotify app was approved earlier this month.
The Spotify app is only available to Premium subscribers who pay a monthly fee of £9.99 in the UK. The ability to download music onto your iPhone or Android phone is currently only available for users in the UK, Sweden, France and Spain. The Premium account enables users to enjoy their Spotify playlists without advert interruptions as well having access to exclusive releases. Streaming audio on your Mac or PC are also at a higher sound quality (320kbps) than the free edition.
Prior to the iPhone and Android apps, I personally stuck with the free version of Spotify. Now that Spotify has gone mobile, I am trialling a Premium account. This is how I’ve got on so far…
Spotify App Review
The iPhone Spotify App makes it very easy to stream your Spotify playlists over a 3G or WiFi network. But the winning feature has to be the ability to download entire playlists onto your iPhone for playback when you don’t have 3G or WiFi access. Spotify calls these Offline playlists. So you don’t need to stop listening to your music collection when you’re on the Subway!
In order to download your Offline playlists, you will need access to 3G or WiFi. It’s interesting to see real-time updates when you make a change to your playlist on your computer – if you have Spotify open on your iPhone it will update in real-time, making synchronisation very quick and efficient.
Choosing which playlists to download to your iPhone is very easy as well. The large ‘Offline playlists’ button at the top of the screen on playlist view (see image on right) enables you to tick all the playlists you want to make available when you are offline. Downloading playlists is fairly quick, but obviously depends on your WiFi Internet speed.
On the other hand, downloading playlists with 3G is quite slow and should be avoided for large numbers of tracks if possible. Once you are happy with your downloaded playlists you can force the Spotify app to go offline for up to 30 days before you will need to login to the Spotify servers. This can be useful if you plan to go abroad and want to avoid costly data charges, or if you want to listen to music on your iPhone on the airplane.
The overall navigation of the app is quite intuitive and very similar to other iPhone applications. I did find some stability issues where the app crashed when changing tracks, but this has been minimal.
It is worth noting that the Spotify app doesn’t work in the background in the way the built-in iPod application works. This means that reading a text message or navigating away from the Spotify application closes the application completely. This can be somewhat annoying, but I don’t see a solution to this unless Apple built the Spotify apps capabilities into the core operating system of the phone.
The track view is pleasant (see image on right), with a large thumbnail of the album cover, and it is possible to flick through tracks to change songs in this view. Clicking the album image also gives you access to additional features – such as adding the track to other playlists, shuffle and repeat track.
Recommended Features & Improvements
The stability of the application is fairly good, however a couple of crashes suggests that there is room for improvement in this area, and I would hope to see more stability in future releases of the app.
I would like to see the vertical alphabet navigation bar present on many iPhone apps such as Contacts. This feature makes it lightening fast to navigate through contacts and other data on the iPhone. If this was added to the Spotify app it would save on having to type into the search box or scroll endlessly to find a specific track in your playlists.
What features and improvements would you like to see on the iPhone Spotify app?
Conclusion
Overall the iPhone Spotify app is very good. It lets you take large playlists of music with you when you are away from an Internet connection. The sound quality is very good and the application feels responsive and fast. I haven’t tested this application on a 3GS, but I can imagine that it will be even more responsive.
Spotify for iPhone Preview
Spotify posted the following video on their website. It gives a good overview of the features available on the app.
More information available on the official Spotify site.
