Apple Music now lets Android users save songs to SD cards for offline listening
Apple Music for Android now has a feature that Apple Music for iOS doesn’t — and probably will never have.
The official Android app of Apple’s music streaming service has just been updated with support for downloading songs to an SD card, “so you can now keep more music offline,” as Apple notes.
Many Android devices come with slots for removable storage cards to supplement their onboard memory. Some of them, like the LG G4, even support SD cards with storage capacities in the order of terabytes.
This means that Apple Music users potentially have far more storage for offline songs at their disposal on Android than on iOS, whose compatible devices can go for up to only 128GB without support for memory expansion via SD card.
The ability to save songs to an SD card for offline listening is in line with Apple’s desire to optimize Apple Music for natural use on Android, even as the service comes from the company behind the operating system’s foremost rival.
“We wanted customers on Android to naturally be able to use it — what they’ve learned and how they interact is common,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, said in an interview following Apple Music’s launch on Android in November. “Things as simple as [that] the share icon looks like an Android share icon; the menu structure being where it is; these are things that most Android customers are familiar with. We wanted to make sure that they felt very familiar with Apple Music when they sat down to use it.”
Aside from SD card storage support, the latest update to the Apple Music app for Android adds the full schedule of shows broadcasting on the curated Internet radio station Beats 1 and the ability to browse My Music by composers and compilations, which is ideal for finding classical albums and movie soundtracks.
Compatible with Android 4.3 and up, Apple Music for Android is available on the Google Play Store for free.
As on other supported platforms, Apple Music on Android offers a free three-month trial, after which the service will cost $9.99 per month.