Pandora Introduces Standalone Apple Watch App, Stream Music and Podcasts With No iPhone Required

Didn’t know pandora was still a thing.

I can't even make it through a day on my series 4 watch & I just play music on my phone. There's no hope for my watch if I start playing music with this app.

What do you do with your watch? I can get almost 2 days on my series 4

No Spotify offline playback - no buy.

I can't even make it through a day on my series 4 watch & I just play music on my phone. There's no hope for my watch if I start playing music with this app.

This will be really nice for when I'm out for a run since I leave my phone behind.

I haven't been able to get it to work over a cell connection. Over WiFi, it works well, though it got into a mode where it would only act as a remote for my iPhone app. I turned off the phone, delete the app from the Watch, re-downloaded it from the Watch App Store, and it returned to autonomous functionality. I hope it doesn't make a habit of switching to remote-only functionality.

UPDATE:

Ugh, it does.

I had it streaming via WiFi with my phone turned off. Turned phone back on, no problem. Turned phone back off, the Watch app stopped streaming and refuses to re-start, presenting me with:



There appears to be no way to get the app running independently again. Force-killing it doesn't help.

So, Pandora still has some work to do.

Nice. I had to explicitly download the new app version from the watch app store, then login with my Pandora credentials. Nice that the watch lets you use the phone for keyboard input.

It appears to still work in the classic mode where the watch app serves as a remote control for the app running on the phone. That'll be handy.

Put phone into airplane mode and tried it out. Worked well over wifi connection.

This will be really nice for when I'm out for a run since I leave my phone behind.

Can you cache music or stations to a WiFi only watch?

You've sort of been able to do that already with Pandora on your phone downloading content for your top stations to your watch. Hasn't really worked very well IMHO with it being pretty thin in how much content I'd see come across, and no way to specify which stations I wanted it to download to the watch. Perhaps they've updated that with the new version.

BTW - it appears the standalone works over wifi. Could be handy at the gym if you can connect watch to their wifi and prefer not to have your phone with you.

Didn’t know pandora was still a thing.

Surprisingly yes and I still feel it’s better than Spotify in regards to new music discovery based of your previous likes. I was on Pandora since the Palm Pre days and only switched to Spotify a year ago because of the package deal they offer with Hulu and Showtime and while Spotify fills the streaming music need for me I still stand by my opinion that Pandora has a much better algorithm.