If you wear an Apple Watch and you’re a Spotify Premium subscriber, the feature that you’ve long been waiting for is finally here. That’s right, as Friday, May 21, you can finally download playlists, albums and podcasts from Spotify onto your Apple Watch for offline listening. Hallelujah.
This is a huge deal because for years, you were only able to download music onto your Apple Watch for offline listening if you were an Apple Music subscriber. It was a great selling point for runners, for example, because it allowed them to leave their iPhone at home and still listen to music via their Apple Watch and wireless earbuds. (If you subscribe to Deezer, you also recently gained the ability to download music to your Apple Watch.)
Previously, the Spotify app on your Apple Watch had been incredibly limited, allowing you to play/pause, switch songs and adjust the volume of tracks playing on your iPhone. But without your iPhone nearby and tethered to your Apple Watch, it was basically useless. Thankfully that’s changing.
Spotify did make a small improvement for Apple Watch wearers last November. It rolled out an update that let them stream music from the Apple Watch without having their iPhone nearby so long as their Apple Watch was connected to Wi-Fi or LTE (the latter meaning they needed a cellular model). Unfortunately, since most people own the more affordable Wi-Fi-only Apple Watch, this didn’t drastically change their experience.
