>> "Still infinitely better than the stock music app"
I've always found the iOS Music app superior to pretty much everything else (including Play). Obviously it doesn't have streaming but as a player the UI is much better. I find Play quite confusing and it wastes a lot of space (e.g. the artists screen - I don't need to see a photo of the artist with their name, it doesn't add any value).
Music.app has a few streaming options. You can stream songs you've bought on iTunes. You can listen to iTunes Radio. You can pay $25/year and stream any MP3 you possess on your home computer and also then get iTunes Radio commercial free.
edit: I'm pretty sure iTunes actually uses a cached progressive download, but the difference is academic.
If you define buying music through the app itself as 'iTunes' then this is a meaningless discussion aimed at bashing the word 'iTunes'.
You can use the app perfectly well without ever going near the desktop iTunes software, as you say by buying music through the device, or using iTunes Radio.
If you have other music you want to load, the yes, you need to use the desktop app for that.
Really? I’m trying it and I disagree. I don’t understand what’s the difference between Listen Now and My Library; I though it would search in the entire Play library but it only finds stuff I already have, even when creating Instant Mixes; recommendations are empty; scrolling is terrible, it loads thumbnails only after you completely stop scrolling (like YouTube), losing most of their usefulness; parts of the UI seem cobbled together (eg. it overrides the cancel button in the AirPlay action sheet displaying an ugly mix of an old and new button); playback stopped as I was typing this, I killed it and now it’s stuck at Loading My Library making no progress.
Do you have a subscription or trial for All Access? Listen Now and instant mixes should definitely use the whole catalog if you do - at least they do in Android and Web.
I don’t, I guess my expectations were wrong, not very clear though. So what are the features available without a subscription? Just music upload from my computer? I was under the impression that some kind of radio/streaming was included in the free account.
Without the subscription it's just a locker really - upload up to 20,000 songs and they're available online on all your devices, I think you can pin them to a device too.
I really wonder why Google does this. It took them months to release the iPad version of their Maps app, with very few UI differences. There's something broken about that workflow.
Not quite as bad as the oft-promised Google Drive for Linux, but still.
Incentive? Do people use Maps and Music on iPad to the extent that they do on iPhone? Personally, I only really use both when I'm on the move - I'm very unlikely to pull out a tablet at that point.
This applies a lot more to Maps than it does to Music, of course.
They have to support the iPhone because it's almost half the smartphone users in the US. They don't need to support the iPad because they don't think of it as an important platform.
