Roger Fingas
Popular music service Spotify will finally be coming to the Apple Watch in the near future via an official app, developed in conjunction with the creator of a third-party client, Snowy.
"I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be working closely with Spotify to bring Snowy to the Apple Watch as part of an official Spotify iOS app," developer Andrew Chang announced this week via Reddit. "Spotify's powerful iOS SDK made it possible to develop Snowy, but I can't wait to take things to the next level with the expertise and tools available at Spotify."
Snowy never made it to the Apple Watch, first because of copyright objections to its original name — "Spotty" — then because of concerns that its interface looked too similar to the Spotify iOS app.
The release date for the official Watch app is unknown, as are specific features. Snowy, though, was expected to support Siri, flick-based playback controls, and interactive watchface complications. Above all though it promised offline caching, which would let people listen without an iPhone when out on a run or at the gym.
Offline caching on the Watch has been a smaller advantage of Apple Music. Subscribers can sync any playlist to a Watch so long as they download it first, and fall within a 2 gigabyte limit. Watch playlists are capped to 1 gigabyte by default to preserve storage space, and the ceiling can optionally be set lower, to as little as 100 megabytes.
Spotify now has over 50 million paid subscribers, and likely many more on its free tier. Apple Music is somewhere over 20 million, but is also less than two years old, whereas Spotify has been active for almost nine.
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6 Comments
Here's hoping we see an Apple TV app soon too!
This is nice and all, but they're unfortunately just a little late to the party for my wife and I. She's had hers since the original launch and I've had a Nike+ since its launch. We cancelled our Spotify accounts and have had Apple Music all this time on the Watch. As much as we liked Spotify, we are now thoroughly entrenched in Apple Music and are loving it.