Apple Music has officially graduated from beta on Android. The service originally launched in June 2015 for Apple users and then expanded to Google's mobile platform in November – making it one of the very few Apple-branded apps that are available outside of its walled garden. Since then the company has been working to bring it in line with the iOS version, adding support for music videos, family subscriptions, and more.
In addition to dropping the beta moniker, today's 1.0 release bringing various bug fixes as well as equalizer settings and a variety of performance, playback, and stability improvements.
The Android app also includes a few features that apart from its iOS sibling due to inherent platform differences. For instance, with Apple Music for Android you can save music to SD cards for offline listening, or add a home screen widget for easily accesible playback controls.
Apple claims it wants to bring Apple Music to everyone in the world and let people enjoy music no matter where they are and what products they are using. Going cross platform is uncharacteristic for Apple but necessary in this case in order to compete against Spotify, Google Play Music, and Tidal. The service is estimated to have at least 15 million paying subscribers, versus Spotify's 30 million and Tidal's 4.2 million subscribers.