The Amazon Cloud Player for Android has been an excellent way to get access to your home collection through a browser or native app but it hasn’t been a great experience on the iPhone or iPad yet. It looks like Amazon has tweaked some of its code in order to make this fully work on iOS devices through the browser.
The Amazon Cloud Player was launched in late May and it was a cloud storage drive where users could purchase space to store their music and then have access to it with any web connection. The prices for storage vary but if you purchase an MP3 album from the store, you get 20 GB of storage for free for a year.
I checked out the service on the my iPad over the weekend and was happy to see that it was working smoothly. Previously, you had to click through to each individual track to play them and now you can play multiple tracks in order.
It will be interesting to see when or if we get a native app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. We know that the Amazon Cloud Player is under fire from the record labels but that doesn’t appear to be holding the Internet commerce giant back.
The bigger issue may be that Apple is preparing its own mobile streaming/online storage offering that could be called iCloud. This is expected to be an online repository for iTunes content and it should let iOS users access music, videos and photos they’ve purchased or uploaded on any iOS device.
The iCould service should be one of the major pushes from Apple moving forward, so it will be interesting to see how it stacks up to Amazon’s product. Google Music is also looming but we’re not holding out too much hope.
[Via The Mac Observer]