I’ve been playing with the Spotify iPhone app for more than 24 hours now and I’m very impressed. You can search for and play any music from the online streaming service’s catalogue as well as the playlists from your desktop version of Spotify. You can also edit your playlists, create new ones, which will sync back to the desktop, and save music to your phone to listen to offline. It’s slick, speedy and intuitive.
The first thing to note is that it’s for Premium subscribers only. Anyone can download the app but it will work only if you pay for a £9.99 a month account. Judging from the reviews in the iTunes store, quite a few people didn’t realise that. It may be time for Apple to flag this in the app pricing. “Free (requires subscription)” would do the trick and with more apps working this way - the Financial Times iPhone app is another example - it’s becoming essential.
The Spotify iPhone app syncs with your playlists
You can use the app on more than one phone. However, Spotify will run on only one device at a time. No sharing your login with other people, in other words. And if your subscription ends then the app will stop working, whether you’ve synced music to it or not.
The crucial feature is the ability to sync music to your phone so that you can listen to it offline. You can store up to 3,333 songs on your phone. Syncing is very smooth on wifi but 3G has been very poor for me. I’ve seldom been able to get the app working in 3G and rarely for long enough to do any proper syncing. 3G coverage varies from area to area, of course, and O2 have had some network problems recently so this is not a flaw in the app itself. Still, I’d recommend that you do your first synch via wifi just to be sure that you have something to listen to.
Syncing is brisk. It took between 10 and 20 seconds to sync a track when I tested it over wifi. That’s fine for adding a couple of albums but syncing thousands will take a few hours. Obviously the number of tracks you can take offline is dependent on the space on your phone’s flash drive. If you reach the limit, you’ll get a message telling you so.
Online or off, the app works very well. I was particularly impressed by the way it resumes playing from where it left off when you restart. The design is simple but effective. The menus are green in ‘online’ mode and blue when ‘offline’. Synced playlists have a green button, partially synced playlists have a grey button. It’s very straightforward.
Spotify warns you when you run out of space
However, the controls are upside down from an iPod users point of view. On the iPhone’s iPod app, the track progress bar is at the top of the screen. In Spotify, the progress bar is at the bottom, where the volume control is on the iPod. Spotify’s volume control is tucked away on the information screen or you can use the volume controls on the side of the phone, which brings up a volume overlay.
Spotify’s major weakness is the iPhone’s app lockdown. When you’re listening to music on Spotify you have to keep the app open. You can receive calls and texts just as you can in other apps but if you want to browse the web or write an email, you’ll need to turn Spotify off.
For iPhone users the inability to have the app run in the background is a major flaw and is likely to be a deal breaker for some. That’s beyond Spotify’s control, however, and is likely to remain so. On an Android phone, Spotify will work in the background.
Some of the neat features of the iPod, such the appearance of ‘now playing’ artwork in place of your wallpaper and the ability to double-tap the home button to bring up iPod controls without unlocking the phone aren’t available in this app. Likewise, the remote on the headphones won’t play and pause the Spotify app.
Some features are locked down by Apple, others, such as muting the music when the headphones are removed, are open to developers but have just not been implemented here. A Spotify spokesman says improvements are planned for future versions of the app.
It would be good to see iPhone integration taken as far as Apple permits in future versions. Other improvements are needed, including making the search function work in offline mode. You can’t search the Spotify database while you’re offline but if you have 3,000 tracks on your phone, it would be handy to be able to search within the tracks you’ve synced.
It’s also clear that Spotify needs a better way to organise playlists. At the moment they appear in a long list. With thousands of tracks on the phone, this too presents an organisational problem. Introducing smart playlists or folders would make things more manageable. Finally, I’d like the tracks I’ve played to be pushed back to Last.fm, just as they are in the desktop version.
The app has crashed on me twice, once in ‘online’ mode while doing a search and once in ‘offline’ mode while switching tracks. I also have one track that won’t sync at all - Graham Coxon’s Look Into The Light, if you’re interested. I’ve no idea what’s happening there.
Overall though the Spotify app is a success. If this review has focused too much on what’s missing or what doesn’t work that’s only because what Spotify does is so simple that there’s not much to say about it. It gives you access to a vast catalogue of online music and lets you store a significant amount of it on your phone.
It’s Spotify’s best hope of building a business. It’s a killer app. It’s worth the subscription.
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