Apple today updated the Android app for its Apple Music service to make the app’s user interface match Apple Music for iOS, macOS, and Windows (through iTunes).
Version 2.0.0 of the Android app, which has 10 million to 50 million downloads from the Google Play store, sheds the frankly mixed-up look and feel of the original incarnation of Apple Music, which debuted in 2015.
In September Apple revamped the iOS app, centering on larger black, white, and red text blocks and larger boxes and images. There’s less clutter, too.
But the Android app went almost entirely untouched, for six months. Today that changes.
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The updated version of Apple Music for Android has reshuffled things that existed in the old version, like Beats 1 shows, albums from a vast catalog, and the search function. But now you can see song lyrics from the Now Playing page, for one thing. The My New Music Mix playlist, which is comparable to Spotify’s Discovery Weekly, is available too.
There’s also a security fix in this app update. David Coomber from Info-Sec.CA found that “an attacker in a privileged network position” could potentially leak user data, and Apple has fixed the issue by improving certificate validation, the company said in a security update.
Not everything in the app is working as you might expect. If your Apple ID account has two-factor authentication turned on, you’ll be told to “type your password followed by the verification code shown on your other devices,” but all you can do is hit cancel or retry. There’s no place to enter the verification code. A viable workaround is turning off two-factor authentication, and then turning it back on again once you’re in. (A reader suggested putting in your password and then putting your six-digit verification code at the end of your password.)
It’s not every day that Apple releases or updates an Android app, as Android is the rival, and more dominant, mobile operating system. But Apple increasingly cares about web services such as Apple Music; services are a growth area for the company. For the quarter that ended on December 31, services gave Apple $7.17 billion in revenue, up 18 percent year to year.
Apple Music had more than 20 million subscribers as of December.
