It’s the news Spotify fans like myself have been waiting for – the music application will finally be available on iPhone “within a few weeks” according to the Swedish company. The question is, will the Apple iPhone apps store approve it?
Spotify is serious competition for iTunes – and considerably superior in my opinion – and allowing it onto the iPhone store could deal a major blow to Apple’s flagship music app. Out of interest, I just performed a search for Spotify on Mac on the Apple downloads website and no results were found although I’m not sure how much can be read into this.
A promotional video launched by Spotify shows that users will also be able to listen to music offline by downloading playlists onto their iPhone. This is great news for those who live in areas where network coverage is poor. However, the bad news is that initially, it’s only going to be available to premium users but this could finally be the driver that Spotify has been looking for to encourage users to convert from the free ad-supported version.
The likelihood is that Apple will approve the app. After all, Spotify is growing hugely and its success will only drive iPhone sales even further and these should offset any losses iTunes makes. And by blocking it from the store, it’s only going to make iPhone users want it more and no doubt, eventually someone would create a hack for it anyway.
One other strange thing worth noting about this news is that Spotify mobile was first demoed on Android and yet it’s being released on iPhone first. Depending on the success of the iPhone version, an Android release will surely follow shortly. US users will have to wait the longest unfortunately – Spotify hasn’t even launched there yet and isn’t expected to until the end of this year.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNCb1IdmJ_0[/youtube]
