Apple Music 5.0 Rolls Out iOS 26 Features on Android
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Android users who may be looking wistfully at everything iOS 26 delivered can now enjoy at least a part of the new Apple experience. This week, the company rolled out Apple Music 5.0 for Android, bringing with it many of the best new features that Apple Music gained in this year’s major iPhone software update.
One thing missing in Apple Music for Android is a Liquid Glass design. That should come as a relief for Android fans, as Liquid Glass would seem just as out of place on Android as Google’s Material Design does on iOS. We have to give Apple’s engineers credit for embracing Android design language in a way that Google seemingly refuses to.
Nevertheless, while Apple hasn’t gone full Liquid Glass, it has updated the design to match its new motif, primarily by switching to pill-shaped buttons for features such as shuffle, repeat, and autoplay.
Apple Music for Android has been a good citizen on the other platform since its beta release in late 2015, coming just a few months after Apple launched its music streaming service. The Android app has never been just a half-baked port to give users the bare minimum; by the time it exited beta in 2016, it had already added support for SD card storage and a five-band equalizer, and it got crossfade three years before the iPhone did.
In addition to those enhancements, Apple has worked to keep the Android app reasonably in step with Apple Music on its own platforms, and Apple Music 5.0 is the latest installment, bringing things more closely into line with the built-in iOS 26 Music app.
The Android Apple Music app adds the ability to pin music to your library so you can keep your favorite playlists, artists, and albums handy. There’s also now a toggle in the app’s settings to automatically download any pinned content to local storage.
Lyrics translation and Pronunciation are also now available for select songs. Unlike Live Translation on the iPhone, this isn’t an AI-powered feature — at least not on the smartphone side. Apple is doing the lyric translations on the back-end, so the Apple Music app is just displaying what’s already there. Apple has acknowledged this is all done using machine learning, but promises that the algorithms have been fine-tuned by language experts to ensure that they accurately reflect emotional and cultural nuances and preserve the artist’s intent.
The selection of translated lyrics is somewhat limited right now, and those that have been translated only cover English/simplified Chinese, English/Japanese, Korean/simplified Chinese, Korean/English, Korean/ Japanese, and Spanish/English.
Lastly, Apple Music Replay has been baked into the Apple Music Android app, so there’s no need to use a web browser to access the soundtrack of your life.
Sadly, Apple hasn’t quite achieved full parity of features, as it’s left out the new AutoMix that’s part of Apple Music in iOS 26. AutoMix is an AI-powered feature that provides smooth transitions between songs by utilizing time stretching and beat matching, ensuring everything flows together seamlessly.
AutoMix is cool, but it’s also limited even within the Apple ecosystem, as you’ll only be able to use it on the iPhone, iPad, an Apple silicon Mac, or the Apple Vision Pro. It’s not available on the Apple TV, HomePod, or Apple Watch, nor Apple Music for Windows. It also won’t work over AirPlay, even if the stream is coming from one of the latest iPhone models.
So, it’s not surprising that it’s been left out of Apple Music for Android. However, at least Android fans can take comfort in the fact that they’ve had crossfade support for much longer than the iPhone version has (an ironic twist, considering the iPod nano introduced it in 2008), plus a much more accessible sleep timer.
