Amazon has updated its Music app for iOS and Android with large improvements to the user interface and navigation of the app. It seems that the company has revealed a ‘free’ version of the service, too.
The app has a more modern look and feel to it. The navigation bar at the bottom has been updated, and all tabs have been refined to be more general. There’s now a ‘Home’ tab, to bring you to recommended songs, featured albums and more, alongside a ‘Find’ option, which features a refined searching interface, and the My Music tab – this replaces Library. We also see the Alexa button prominent, as before.
To fit in with other music streaming services, Amazon Music now has a revamped music player above the navigation tabs. Before, this was a circle that had album art, with options to hold and swipe left and right to change track. Now, you have a play/pause button and skip track, and you can still swipe on the track details (the name, artist name and album art) to change the song.
Alongside these changes, it appears that Amazon has refined the fonts and icons that appear in albums and playlists. We’ll likely see more interface updates soon, but it’s a very welcome upgrade and makes it much more pleasant to use.
Apple TLD has discovered that Amazon is working on a free version of its Music service, which, at the moment, is limited to paid plans starting at $9.99 a month, cheaper for Prime users. It arose earlier this year that the company was in discussions about a free service for the Amazon Echo – but it looks like this has come to the mobile app, today.
In this version, we are introducing free streaming music. Listen to top playlists and thousands of stations for free.
With version 9.30 of the app, the release notes in the iOS App Store stated that Amazon was introducing “free streaming music”. Users of the free plan will have access to limited stations and playlists, alongside some songs. It’s a good move made by Amazon to compete with Spotify.
Download the new update for your iPhone or Android device.
