Apple has released a new beta version of the Apple Music app for Android (v4.5). It brings many features to Galaxy phones that arrived on iPhones with iOS 17. The changes include the addition of two new widgets: Recommendations and Top Charts, support for Dynamic Color theming in all the widgets, a redesign to the Recently Added widget, and the introduction of three new features: SharePlay in the Car, Suggested Songs in Playlists, and More to Favorite (via 9to5Google).
Two all-new widgets
Let’s discuss widgets first. Apple Music v4.5 for Android brings two new widgets: Recommendations and Top Charts. The first widget, according to Apple, allows you to “Play Top Picks, New Releases, and other suggestions from Apple Music”. Whereas, Top Charts lets you “Play Top Charts based on a location or city of your choice”.
As for the redesign of the Recently Played widget, Apple has changed the way songs appear in it. The widget now shows tracks in a list view rather than showing a grid of cover images. This list mentions the name of the song and the artist. Along with this, the company has renamed the Apple Music Player widget to the Now Playing widget.
Support for Dynamic Color
All widgets now support Dynamic Color theming, which means that these widgets can now appear in the same colour as your device’s theme or wallpaper. However, Now Playing and Recently Played widgets use blurred album artwork as their background. So, they might not appear in your device’s theme even though they support Dynamic Color.
Useful new features
As for the new features, there are three: SharePlay in the Car, Suggested Songs in Playlists, and More to Favorite. The first one lets everyone in a car control what’s playing on the speakers (requires Apple CarPlay). The second one allows you to “ Quickly add from a selection of songs designed to fit your playlist”. The last one enables you to “Favorite songs, albums, and playlists” and once you do that “they’ll appear in your library”.
You can get the latest beta version of Apple Music for Android by opting for the beta program through the Google Play Store. Currently, there’s no information about when will these features arrive in the stable version of the app. However, it should happen in the next couple of weeks.
