Xbox Music 2.0 for Android Also Adds Limited Offline Support, Other Improvements

Less than a week after the release of Xbox Music 2.0 for iOS, Microsoft has updated its Xbox Music app on Android as well. Like its very similar iOS sibling, Xbox Music 2.0 adds the ability to download music so you can listen to it offline. And like the iOS version, that capability is limited to playlists only.

Everything I wrote in Xbox Music for iOS 2.0 Adds Offline Support last week applies to the Android version. Oddly enough, I just updated my Xbox Music book to document this offline support in the iOS app, as noted in Paul Thurrott's Xbox Music 2.0 (Pre-Release 0.3). So I've since updated the document to include the Android support as well.

Microsoft doesn't really blog about what it's doing with the Android and iOS apps for Xbox Music, so we need to cull information from the app descriptions in the Apple App Store and Play Store, and spend some time in the apps to figure out what's up. Here's what I'm seeing.

Xbox Music 2.0 for Android (which requires an Xbox Music Pass) includes the following changes:

Download music to the device. You can download playlists only, so that they are available for offline use.

Play improvements. Microsoft added two features users had been asking for: The ability to play (and/or shuffle) your whole collection and play all by genre.

Inline help. There are also some undocumented help interfaces that have been added to the app, which I don't see elsewhere. This is a nice little touch.

Native controls. Also, the Android version of the app is using native Android controls, so it has kind of a more aggressive look than the soft iOS 7-based version of that app. This makes sense, of course.

Android: 

iOS: