I started using Android’s Google Music app in place of my iPod about two months ago. While I haven’t missed carrying around an extra piece of hardware in my pocket, here are a few details keeping the Google Service from eclipsing Apple’s gold standard iPod. (For our purposes here, I’m specifically talking about the Android app, not the HTML5 mobile site that Google built for iPhone users.)
- Make Google Music skinnable
Personally, I love Music’s UI. A cursory browse through my Android backgrounds shows I tend toward the dark blues, so Google gets points from me on their color scheme. But if there’s one thing Android users and younger tech consumers like to do, it’s to personalize their experience. Play into that and add a (free) skins section to the Google Music store. We know they can do it; just yesterday, Google released Ice Android 4.0 stencils to make the design process easier. These could help users change the fonts, color schemes, and even album cover placement. If it takes a hot-pink True Blood background with animated glitter to convert kids to your product, Google should give it to them.
- Integrate an improved Google Listen into Music
We looked at the major problems with Listen last week. After they take care of those, this is a no-brainer. Combining Music and Listen in the same app would make the experience less confusing for Android users and more familiar to iPod users. While they’re at it, Google should use the name Listen instead of Music for their audio app. Half of what they consider my music is actually audio books, stand up comedy, and long-form interviews. Adding podcasts to the mix would make the current name even less sensible.
- Provide a decent widget that’s accessible from the lock screen
Us Android users love our widgets, but I regularly shake my head in frustration at the sad excuse for a widget provided by Google Music. It’s pretty much identical to the sad stock music widget, with no cover art and only pause and fast forward buttons. What’s more, it’s not even accessible from the Android lock screen. To pause a song, I have to unlock the phone, open the music app, and then pause it. Seriously, what’s up with that? A lock screen accessible widget is a basic functions for a good music app, and Google’s offering is almost absurdly lacking.
- Improve the offline experience
One of the annoying things about living in mobile signal hell is how difficult it is to stream anything on my Android device, let alone for extended periods. Unless I have access to WiFi, my battery is quickly drained by searching for anything above a 1X. Because of that, I’ve been forced to become intimately familiar with Google Music’s attempts to make music available offline. It’s not so bad if I just want to download all of a particular artist’s music; just tap on the icon next to the artist’s name and tap the offline button. Same goes for downloading just one album. All I have to do is find it in the album list and adding it to the download queue is two taps away. But what if I just want to download one song? Well, I can’t do that. At all. I have to download all of her music or all of that album. Again, why limit our options?
Google is so close to pulling this off. Do these four things and they will take Apple’s place in the music players’ hearts.
Google music as a service is a failure, other than being a useful backup to your music collection, now at least you can re-download what you have uploaded, of course the files you download will be missing ID3 tags or filenames I’m told. I’m sure for the reasons you listed plus some weird issues about the music manager not seeing certain folders or files, problems with tagging not getting synchronized and other assorted weirdness.
whatever google music is going to become, it’s clear the launch hype about being in the same league as iTunes was a marketeer’s fantasy. for this user who still listens to a wide variety of music at home and while driving (using my iPod with no aspirations for another device) and appreciates “discovery” experiences while browsing along with accurate metadata to download and for whom backing up my collection is not important: iTunes’ useability, graphical interface-integration (i.e. the store IS the player unlike the somewhat clunky google setup) makes for a better experience. I do think the online download world is big enough for multiple players and competition is a good thing. I just haven’t found google music a very compelling presence for the kind of user experience I’m interested in.