In spite of the issues with music labels the company is facing in the attempt to launch the service in the United States, Spotify is still committed to making great mobile apps to stream, organize and cache music for offline access while on the go. A major update to the iPhone client (not available in the US App Store) was released last night, and you can find it here for free.
The Spotify iPhone app requires a Premium account: this subscription enables you to use the mobile apps for iOS, Android and other devices, removes ads and lets you stream songs at a higher bitrate. Premium also allows you to save music offline and access the service from another country (that’s what I do). The new iPhone app (version 0.4.11) is a rather big update as it brings a completely new (and elegant) UI design, much cleaner than before. With this new design style, I can’t wait to see what the iPad app will look like – Spotify hasn’t detailed plans for an iPad client but that’s most likely in the works and (finally) ready to ship. The new Spotify for iPhone has also been localized into French and Spanish, and marks the comeback of the Edit button to create and manage playlists, select them for offline usage and delete them. In the main screen, the “Local Files” tab indicates the music files wirelessly synced from Spotify on your computer. The (very unstable) iPod integration feature has been removed in this version.
Spotify for iPhone is available here. More screenshots below.