I use a MBP, iMac, and my phone is an iPhone XR (which I steadfastly and wrongly call the "ex-ar"). I'm a very happy user of Spotify and after doing the trial of Apple Music cancelled the latter and still continue with the former. I tried Google Play Music a while back and honestly thought it was just terrible, though maybe it got better since.

Spotify has all the music I've ever searched for. It has great curated playlists, and great algorithmic playlists. It has great "related music". They've gotten that all down brilliantly. Of course it has the ability to download playlists if you will be offline.

The app is available on everything, and the integration between devices is brilliant. It's on my LG TV, my Windows desktop, the xbox...every device. Spotify has no platform bias -- their entire business is modeled around streaming music, and not pushing some secondary goal which inevitably is what Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc have in mind.

Same here. Apple music had trouble loading music and just generally acted sluggish. I gladly pay for Spotify.

I can't honestly, apple music like many apple services is impossible to use outside their ecosystem, while play music (which I use) I can use in my iPad and my Google pixel for instance. Apple is able to dominate the US market in ways very hard for me to understand, another example is iMessage.

The iMessage domination is automatic -- if you message from an Apple device to a phone number that happens to be an Apple device (which the sender might be oblivious to), it's an iMessage. People aren't subscribing to iMessage, or intentionally choosing it, the thing is just the default in that case.

Apple Music heavily pushed, on the device, a 3 month free trial, and it's about time that most of those 3 month trials expire. I imagine the number will drop substantially after.

> it's about time that most of those 3 month trials expire. I imagine the number will drop substantially after.

Apple's been heavily pushing the service with the same 3 month trial for several years and has seen huge growth over the whole period. There's no big correction that's waiting to hit.

Despite numerous Apple devices I'd never gotten so forceful a push for Apple Music as I did early this year, and indeed Apple has started using tactics that were verboten before, such as push notifications. Of course there is "huge growth", there is a billion devices and they push it with the platform. I do think there are going to be enough people that just don't find it good enough.

I was surprised when a young girl I know was asking for an iPhone over an Android specifically because of iMessage. I gather the main piece of functionality here is that other iPhone users she texts know that she’s using an iPhone. Gotta get that vanity blue text.

It makes a big difference in group messages. Group messages just outright suck on android. And if you're in a group chat with both iphone and android people it doesn't always send messages to the android people

What is surprising indeed is the use of SMS in US, nobody uses SMS outside US.

Apple Music works best in the Apple ecosystem, but not exclusively. There is an Android app and the Windows version of iTunes supports it as well.

I remember using Apple Music on an android phone and windows pc when the service launched. As far as I know there are no official options for using Apple Music on linux.

Sadly there are signs that Google Play Music is going to be shut down soon and replaced by YouTube Music.

More than signs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/googleplaymusic/comments/b94zf6/goo...

Guess I will cancel my service if YouTube Music is nowhere near as good as All Music Access. I am starting to want to get an iPhone more as time passes.

For me Spotify is about a good/decent app no matter the platform, great/good recommendations - at least for me, and as far as I can tell, they are trying to innovate without completely forgetting their existing customers.