Your Groove Finally Comes to Groove for Android and iOS
- Paul Thurrott
- Dec 16, 2016
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Microsoft has worked steadily to improve its Groove music service, and this week it finally brought Your Groove, a curated playlists feature, to Groove for Android and iOS.
Your Groove is Microsoft’s answer to one of the best features in leading music services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music, each of which offers excellent music discovery functionality.
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Your Groove is somewhat unique, however, in that it works well for those who subscribe to Microsoft’s music subscription service, Groove Music Pass, as well as those who don’t. Music Pass subscribers will see an extensive collection of playlists based on the entire Groove collection. But all users are also provided with playlists based on the music they’ve stored in OneDrive; these latter types of playlists serve as a way to rediscover music you own but maybe haven’t listened to in a while.
In any event, after teasing that this functionality was coming, Microsoft began testing Your Groove in early summer with Windows Insiders. Andit finally arrived in Groove for Windows 10 (for PCs and Mobile) in July.
At that time, Groove for Android and iOS was still the sad, initial version of the mobile app, so it did not get the Your Groove feature. But Microsoft issued a major update to Groove for Android and iOS in mid-July, too. And this week, finally, these versions of the app picked up Your Groove.
(If I’m being honest here, I didn’t even remember that Your Groove wasn’t in the Android and iOS apps; looking back on what I wrote about this in July, I see that these apps had a feature in the Explore view that was sort of like Your Groove. And whatever.)
The description for this update (version 10.1213.1426 on iOS; 10.1209.1646 on Android) notes:
- In Your Groove, dive into music with personalized playlists and a handy list of your recent plays
- Various bug fixes
So, there you go. Feature parity at last.
Now, let’s please bring a family plan to Groove, Microsoft, so I can stop adding a caveat every time I discuss this service.