Apple Music SongShift

Photo Credit: reddit user (_22cm_)

Apple Music appears to be testing a special feature for its Android app—making it easy to switch away from competing streaming services like Spotify. Here’s the latest.

An eagle-eyed redditor spotted integration with SongShift in the latest Apple Music for Android beta. SongShift is a third-party service that makes it easy to transfer music libraries between streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and more. This native integration appears to be an A/B test for Android users, offering them the ability to move from a competing music service into Apple Music.

“Add saved music and playlists you made in other music services to your Apple Music library,” the prompt shown asks under the header ‘Transfer Music from Other Services.’

The integration makes it easy to transfer all saved music and playlists, but it doesn’t work on Spotify’s algorithmically generated playlists. That means if you really like the ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist that Spotify generates, you can’t move it over to Apple Music.

Right now the feature appears to be an Android-only feature, which makes sense. Apple Music was gated to iOS-only devices until 2015 when the service finally made its way to Android.

As Apple has become a company powered by its Services division—it has decided to dabble in platform agnosticism for those services (Apple Music, Apple TV). But offering an easy way for Android users to transfer their saved playlists from Spotify means it is offering a quick and easy perk to anyone looking to switch services.

Spotify has had a hardware deal in place with Samsung since 2019 to come pre-installed on all Samsung Galaxy devices. Samsung is by far the largest Android phone manufacturer, controlling 33.8% of the Android phone market as of February 2024. That means most Android users have defaulted to Spotify—thanks largely to generous three-month and six-month Spotify Premium offers for new sign-ups.