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]

Top Rated Comments

Red Oak Avatar
101 months ago
Who knew they even had a music streaming service. DOA
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
MH01 Avatar
101 months ago
Did not know this existed.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Blakjack Avatar
101 months ago
Definitely didn't know they had a music app.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Daws001 Avatar
101 months ago
Microsoft has a music app? o_O
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
machpost Avatar
101 months ago
Cool, I can finally listen to WMAs on my iPhone.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
dmylrea Avatar
101 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)

Popular Stories

maxresdefault

Apple Announces 'Let Loose' Event on May 7 Amid Rumors of New iPads

Tuesday April 23, 2024 7:11 am PDT by
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple Silicon AI Optimized Feature Siri

Apple Releases Open Source AI Models That Run On-Device

Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple Vision Pro Dual Loop Band Orange Feature 2

Apple Cuts Vision Pro Shipments as Demand Falls 'Sharply Beyond Expectations'

Tuesday April 23, 2024 9:44 am PDT by
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
iOS 18 Siri Integrated Feature

iOS 18 Rumored to Add These 10 New Features to Your iPhone

Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
iPad And Calculator App Feature

Apple Finally Plans to Release a Calculator App for iPad Later This Year

Tuesday April 23, 2024 9:08 am PDT by
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...