When we reviewed the ultra low-end Galaxy J1, we noted that the phone didn't come loaded with Samsung's music player app. Rather surprisingly, Samsung had put Google's Play Music app on the device for the user's music needs, and we had surmised at the time that the J1's weak hardware might have been the reason for the absence of Samsung's music app, as it had been rather heavy and memory-intensive before the Galaxy S6 and its optimized version of TouchWiz came along.
Well, it seems there is some other reason for why Samsung is doing this, as the Galaxy J5 doesn't have the company's music app either, despite being powered by a Snapdragon 410 processor. The J5 does have only 1.5GB of RAM, while the J1 had only 512MB, so it's possible high memory requirements could be the deciding factor for why Samsung is shipping the Google Play Music app on these devices instead of its own excellent music player. But then, seeing the S6 only seems to use around 10 MB of RAM when playing music, it doesn't exactly seem plausible that the app's memory usage is the main culprit.
Of course, it's also possible that the Korean giant doesn't want to offer a great experience to those on a budget – the Google Play Music app isn't bad, but it is nowhere near as good as the stock TouchWiz music app. We have reached out to Samsung for an official statement on the matter, and we will be sure to update this post once we get an answer.
In the meantime, let us know why you think the stock Samsung music app is missing from the Galaxy J lineup! Also look forward to our review of the Galaxy J5 (and the Galaxy J7 if we can get our hands on it) in the coming days.
