It seems incredible, but five years have passed since Waze, the collaborative map service acquired by Google, added the ability to connect your app with Spotify to, in this way, have the basic playback controls directly in the Waze interface. With this integration, which other services have subsequently adopted, users can pause and resume playback, as well as move between tracks, without losing sight of the route.
That the first service with which Waze established this connection was Spotify is the most normal thing in the world, because after all It was and still is the most used streaming music service in the world. According to data from the fourth quarter of last year, its market share was 31%, followed by Apple Music with 15%, Amazon Music and Tencent Music with 13% each, and YouTube Music in fifth position with a 8%.
However the situation has changed substantially in the years since that first integration. In this time we have seen the number of users of other services grow and, consequently, we expected Waze to take more steps in this service, integrating them into the interface of its app for Android and iOS. Not that it was a critical need, of course, otherwise it would have been resolved years ago, but it is a substantial improvement in terms of usability. And the most striking thing is that, indeed, it has been, but until now the Apple service had always been left out.
And the good news is that, as reported by Google on the service’s blog, Waze has finally integrated Apple Music into its iOS app. There is no mention of its version for Android in the brief statement, which makes us think that Waze users who use Apple Music on Android terminals will not be able, at least in the short term, to make use of this integration. , and I recognize that this is something that surprises me.
This delay is even more surprising considering that Waze is owned by Google, and that its other mapping service, Google Maps, isI have had this integration for quite some time. On other occasions, Google has used Waze to test functions that have subsequently made the leap to Google Maps. It would be most interesting to know the reasons why, on this occasion, the process has followed the opposite direction.
