Microsoft announced an overhaul of its Groove music app for iOS yesterday, featuring a redesigned interface and a handful of new features for the subscription-based service, home to over 40 million tracks.

The 3.5.6 update promises a much faster sign-in for mobile users of the $9.99-per-month service and introduces a new Explore view to the UI where users can discover popular songs and new releases from top artists.

Microsoft Groove iOS
The update also offers significant improvements to playback reliability, as well as faster download of songs and albums for offline playing. Lossless OneDrive support and new sorting options when viewing music collections have also been implemented.

In addition, the update includes fixes to the sync process that requires users' music collections to be rebuilt from scratch, which Microsoft promises is a one-time procedure, as well as optimizations to screen resolution to support larger mobile displays.

The app still needs to be in the foreground to download music, although Microsoft says a background download feature is coming in a future update. 

Microsoft Groove is a free download for iPhone and iPad available from the App Store. [Direct Link]

Tag: Microsoft Groove

Top Rated Comments

Red Oak Avatar
Red Oak
122 months ago
Who knew they even had a music streaming service. DOA
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
MH01 Avatar
MH01
122 months ago
Did not know this existed.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Blakjack Avatar
Blakjack
122 months ago
Definitely didn't know they had a music app.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Daws001 Avatar
Daws001
122 months ago
Microsoft has a music app? o_O
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
machpost Avatar
machpost
122 months ago
Cool, I can finally listen to WMAs on my iPhone.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DEMinSoCAL Avatar
DEMinSoCAL
122 months ago
Ha! While I almost never use Groove, I updated the app on my iPhone and launched it. Guess what? Freezes on opening screen then crash and burn. Nice work, Microsoft. Seems the Zune software days were your best.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
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