If you download the files to your laptop, you'll still have those files to keep and transfer between your devices. I bought most of my music on iTunes, then copied it across to my Android device via a microSD card.

(Incidentally, I'm still looking for a good Android music player for my offline files. Google Play Music works, but it isn't very elegant & it's hard to browse when you have lots of artists. I guess I'm wondering what the modern day Android equivalent of Winamp is.)

Poweramp [1] has a really nice UI (even with an ugly website) and properly refreshes when new music is added to the filesystem. I wrote some code [2] to rsync my music from iTunes to my Android phone over wifi as I got sick of all the buggy syncing solutions.

[1]: http://powerampapp.com/ [2]: https://github.com/jakecoppinger/android-itunes-rsync

I've been using Syncthing [0] for syncing music between all of my devices (Android phone included) for quite a while and it has always worked perfectly for me.

Curious if you also consider that one of those "buggy syncing solutions" you mentioned? And if so, what issues have you experienced with it?

[0] https://syncthing.net/

Try poweramp.

> I don't buy music files from Amazon or Google, since the UX is better as an iPhone user with iTunes music store.

Well, that and you can't buy music from Amazon or Google on an iPhone because neither wants to pay Apple their required cut.