New Pandora app lets you stream music to Apple Watch & AirPods without iPhone

I hope this comes to Spotify and SiriusXM.

AppleInsider said:

Pandora's official update reads, "Leave the phone at home and bring all of your listening with you thanks to our updated Apple Watch app. Now you can stream your favorite music and podcasts, straight from your wrist - no phone required."

Other services, like Apple Music, need users to pre-load music on an Apple Watch for a run or other exercise, when the iPhone isn't in range. The feature requires the watch in question to be running watchOS 6 or greater.

I'm not sure this is accurate. I can stream Apple Music to my (LTE) Apple Watch when my phone is not with me, there is no pre-loading of music required. But if I had a GPS-only Apple Watch how would Pandora stream music if my phone wasn't nearby?  To be clear, the quote from Pandora's website is an accurate quote, I'm just not sure the content of the quote is correct. My guess is that Pandora neglected to add "*cellular connectivity required".

ihatescreennames said:

AppleInsider said:

Pandora's official update reads, "Leave the phone at home and bring all of your listening with you thanks to our updated Apple Watch app. Now you can stream your favorite music and podcasts, straight from your wrist - no phone required."

Other services, like Apple Music, need users to pre-load music on an Apple Watch for a run or other exercise, when the iPhone isn't in range. The feature requires the watch in question to be running watchOS 6 or greater.

I'm not sure this is accurate. I can stream Apple Music to my (LTE) Apple Watch when my phone is not with me, there is no pre-loading of music required. But if I had a GPS-only Apple Watch how would Pandora stream music if my phone wasn't nearby?  To be clear, the quote from Pandora's website is an accurate quote, I'm just not sure the content of the quote is correct. My guess is that Pandora neglected to add "*cellular connectivity required".

I think that’s a given - you need cellular or wifi connectivity. 

It's problematic for Spotify to continually claim competitive issues from Apple, when a much smaller player is able to bring out an "offline" and streaming capable Watch app, while leaving Spotify users waiting yet again. This is in stark contrast to Spotify's effort which requires the phone nearby, and doesn't even support the larger screen sizes available with 2018's Apple Watch range.

Other services, like Apple Music, need users to pre-load music on an Apple Watch for a run or other exercise, when the iPhone isn't in range. The feature requires the watch in question to be running watchOS 6 or greater.

This isn't all that accurate, with an Apple Watch (and without the paired iPhone nearby) you can do the following in addition to preloading content:

• Browse and stream your full music library 
• Browse and steam customised For You selections of music
• Browse and stream Apple Music's Radio stations along with custom stations (this is in the separate Radio app)

Additionally the device will also intelligently pre-load content onto the watch without you specifically needing to request it (Weekly playlists, favourites, song/albums from artists you've been listening to etc), however I think your statement fairly assumed that functionality.

The only thing the Apple Watch doesn't currently do is let the user perform a wide-net browsing/searching of the Apple Music catalogue.