Apple Music 5.0 Beta for Android Previews iOS 26 Features

Apple has often been somewhat fairly accused of trying to keep iPhone users inside its walled garden. Still, when it comes to its money-making services, the company is not only happy to welcome Android users into the fold, but in some cases, it does even more for them.

Such is the case with Apple Music. The company debuted its streaming service in July 2015, and by November 2015, Apple Music became the first mainstream Apple app to appear on the Google Play Store. Granted, it was technically a “beta” for the first year, but that was just Apple hedging its bets, as it was available to anyone who wanted to try it out.

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This wasn’t just a half-baked port. Apple had a team of developers who were willing to dive deep into the Android ecosystem, and by 2016, it already supported storing music on SD cards and a five-band equalizer. By late 2020, Apple Music on Android had gained support for crossfade — a feature that became standard on the iPod nano in 2008 but inexplicably took until iOS 17 to come to the iPhone Music app. In 2022, Apple added a built-in sleep timer to Apple Music for Android that was much easier to enable than the iPhone version.

Nevertheless, Apple typically tries to maintain feature parity for Apple Music across all its platforms, including Android, a platform that seems to be its second-highest priority for Apple Music, even ahead of the iPad and Mac. For example, Apple debuted Apple Music Classical for the iPhone in March 2023 and released an Android version in May. It didn’t come to the iPad until November, and still isn’t available on the Mac (unless you count the web app).

So, it’s no surprise that while this year’s release of iOS 26 will bring several new features to Apple Music on the iPhone, Apple plans to make sure the Android app is also ready to play along.

This week, Apple released a beta version of Apple Music for Android on the Google Play Store that’s available for everyone who has signed up to participate in the betas.

While it stops short of getting the full Liquid Glass treatment, Apple Music 5.0 does get some basic design tweaks to match the new motif, such as pill-shaped buttons. More significantly, there’s also support for new iOS 26 Apple Music features:

• Pin Music to Your Library lets you keep your favorite playlists, artists, and albums in easy reach. A corresponding toggle in the app’s settings also lets you automatically download any pinned content to local storage.
• Lyrics Translation & Pronunciation is also enabled, which isn’t surprising as this isn’t an AI feature. Instead, Apple is simply providing translated lyrics on the back-end “for select songs,” and they’re only going to be between a handful of languages: English to simplified Chinese, English to Japanese, Korean to simplified Chinese, Korean to English, Korean to Japanese, and Spanish to English.
• Apple Music Replay can now be accessed directly within the app, just like on the iPhone, without the need to hop out into a browser view.
  

Sadly, there’s one new iOS 26 Apple Music feature that Android users won’t be getting. The new AI-powered AutoMix feature is still exclusive to Apple’s mainstream devices — the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Even the HomePod isn’t getting AutoMix; it’s still catching up in gaining the Crossfade feature in HomePod Software 26.

Then again, Apple Music users on Android got to enjoy smooth crossfades three years before they came to the iPhone. The Android app also has an “Automatic” setting for Crossfades that can adjust the length based on what’s playing, which puts it ahead of the fixed-length setting on the iPhone. AutoMix goes a step further, with time stretching and beat matching based on AI analysis, but depending on what you’re listening to, the automatic crossfades on Android may not be far off.