Apple Allows iTunes Competitor on App Store

The approval of spotify is a sign of change at Apple

Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller has made it his personal mission to fix the iPhone's App Store. Phil Shoemaker, Apple’s Director of Application Technology is also playing a hand. Why would the top brass at a company like Apple be having to work so hard to "fix" a wildly successful marketplace that sold over a billion apps? It boils down to one thing -- perception.

Apple has consistently shown inconsistency, approving usenet applications designed to assist in filesharing, while rejecting others that monitor your torrent client. Likewise it rejected Google Voice, while approving a similar app from VoIP service Vonage. Still other controversial apps -- like the infamous "Babyshaker" app -- it approved only to later reject. However, there are some signs that Apple may finally be loosening up when it comes to its app store censorship.

This week Apple approved Spotify Mobile, a European music download service's application. The app will compete directly with iTunes in digital music sales.

In the past, Apple forbade most applications that competed with the handful of applications it offers for the iPhone. It relaxed this restriction slightly, recently allowing rival web browsers -- but only those based on WebKit, the rendering engine Apple's Safari browser uses.

For those interested, Spotify offers 6 million songs on-demand for $16. You can stream songs to your phone, or download songs to listen to when offline.

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Spotify iPhone App - learn to music on your iPhone

Spotify (Free with premium subscription) is now available for iPhone (and iPod touch) is now available — if you live in the UK, Sweden, Spain, France, Norway or Finland.



According to Spotify, if you live in those countries and have a premium subscription, you can enjoy:

• Access to millions of tracks with Spotify’s constantly updated catalogue
• Search and stream music instantly. Browse by artist, title, album, genre, label or year
• Create and synchronise playlists. Updates from the desktop application will be synced instantly and vice versa
• Playlists can be downloaded and played in offline mode when you have no connection, are on a plane or subway, or abroad and subject to roaming data fees
• Listen to tracks and albums in their entirety. Rewind, fast-forward, pause, skip and shuffle
• View cover art for all tracks and albums

So, if you live in one of those countries, and have a premium account, and an iPhone or iPod touch (list long enough yet?) and you try out the Spotify App, let us know how it works for you!

[via The iPhone Blog]

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Free iPhone Music - Only if Spotify is Allowed on the AppStore

"If Spotify has its way, iPhone owners will no longer be slaves to iTunes, song-by-song payments or finite disk capacity," Adam Taylor reports for TIME Magazine.

"Last week the Swedish company behind Spotify's streaming music provider announced plans to release a free iPhone application that will let users listen to songs played directly off of its online service, with no need to download," Taylor reports. "That would give iPhone users instant access to any of Spotify's 6 million songs, without taking up precious memory space — way more than the maximum 7,000 tracks that a 32GB iPhone can hold."

Taylor reports, "Songs can also be temporarily stored, or cached, ready to play during those moments when web connection drops, like when you're going through a tunnel or underground. Spotify's new application could change the way iPhone users listen to music. But first, it has to get the okay from Apple."

"Spotify's new application won't be available to everyone, only those who opt for the premium service, which costs $15 a month for unlimited streams... access to pre-releases and better audio quality than the free service, which forces users to listen to ads after every few songs," Taylor reports. "Spotify hopes to have its new application available on the iPhone within the next few weeks. The trick is getting Apple to approve an application that some observers see as a potential challenger to Apple's own iTunes."

[via Mac Daily News]

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