Spotify Tests Untethered Apple Watch Streaming for Some Users
In November 2018, Spotify released an accompanying app for Apple Watch that allows iPhone users to access and control their favorite Spotify music and podcasts from their wrist.
One of the limitations of the app is that it doesn’t allow users to stream music directly to their Apple Watch without an iPhone connection, which effectively makes it a wrist-based remote control for Spotify on iPhone.
That could be set to change, however, as iPhone-Ticker.de reports that some users of the app are seeing dedicated support for direct audio streaming to Apple Watch without being connected to iPhone.
Users with the feature report that they can stream Spotify through connected Bluetooth headphones or through the Apple Watch’s built-in speaker over LTE or Wi-Fi. The function appears in the app as a blue beta icon, suggesting it’s still an experimental feature with limited rollout.
There’s no indication that the appearance of the beta feature is tied to a particular version of watchOS or iOS, but hopefully it won’t be long before the ability to stream Spotify from the wrist will be available to all subscribers. That should come as good news for Apple Watch LTE owners who regularly leave their iPhone at home to go for a run, for instance.
Having said that, the Spotify app for Apple Watch still has no option to store music locally on your wrist for offline listening, so hopefully that’s something the company is also working on behind the scenes.
