No one loves bloatware but apparently the biggest tech-juggernaut on the planet is about to push “bloatware” into their OS-based devices. There has been a lot of competition in the music-streaming market lately. Google too has been pushing its own Youtube Music app to the worst extent possible.
So here’s the deal, what should a company do to force an app on to new customers ?? Google has an “amazing” solution for this – pre-install the app into millions of Android-based devices and don’t even care about what the customers really want. Safe to say that Google has always been business-minded and this time Google might just have crossed certain limits. The company announced today that the Youtube Music App will come pre-installed on all new devices launching with Android 10 as well as Android 9, including its own Pixel series of smartphones. Isn’t that a wonderful way to thrust an app on users !!
With big players in the market like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music and the likes, Youtube Music was having difficulties in being “seemingly popular” within a short time. So Google had a solution to make the app available on every smartphone running android. The Google Play Music service (which also of course comes pre-installed in android ) was launched by Google in 2011. The other music streaming service from Google was introduced in 2015 as “Youtube Music”. As of last May, Google also allowed you to buy YouTube Music separately, if you’d prefer. Since the app was launched, it didn’t really gather as huge attention as its competitors had achieved. YouTube also offered a subscription tier, originally called YouTube Red and re-branded later to YouTube Premium, which would provide access to both Google Play Music and YouTube Music. Besides that, Google Play’s subscribers would also receive access to YouTube Premium.
Google is desperately trying to establish itself in the music-streaming industry. However this isn’t for free, everything from Google comes with a price, be it your private information or be it your cash. With a paid subscription, YouTube Music users can listen ad-free and offline. It also just introduced its own version of Spotify’s Discover Weekly, with the launch of its own Discover Mix.
Spotify claimed to have 232 million monthly active users and 108 million paying subscribers at the end of June. Apple Music in June surpassed 60 million subscribers. Youtube Music on the other hand, in May, had some 15 million subscribers. So there’s over a 100 million user gap between Youtube Music and its competitors. Google is well aware of this fact and it sure is desperate to make its music streaming app popular especially when (according to recent reports) Google Play Music was “supposed” to shut down soon.
