These App Alternatives Are Faster Than Apple Music

Every time you open the Music app on your iPhone, there’s a good chance that you’ll be staring at a loading icon for a lot longer than you’d like. Apple Music may be a great service for streaming and discovering music, but it iPhone app tends to be much slower and buggier than your expect from a flagship Apple product. This is definitely a case where third party apps can offer a better experience, speeding up your access to your music and reducing your frustration. Here are four great alternatives to the Apple Music app.

Soor (iPhone, iPad)

Soor ($10.99) is a great example of what Apple Music’s own app should’ve been like. It features a highly customisable home page that lets you keep your favourite sections right at the top. If you dislike Apple Music’s “radio stations” feature, you can easily keep it out of the limelight on Soor.

Apart from tweaking the layout, Soor also lets you create customised smart playlists. For example, you can create a ‘70s rock playlist that will auto-populate with stuff that fits your criteria while excluding that one band you absolutely hate.

Soor has an intuitive interface and also supports time-synced lyrics via Musixmatch, so you won’t miss out on any major features of Apple Music.

Apple Music Electron (Windows, Linux)

If you’re tired of iTunes on Windows, you can give Apple Music Electron a shot. It’s free to download and it works much better than Apple’s own player. If you use iTunes just to play Apple Music songs, then you can make the switch pretty much immediately.

Apple Music Electron loads much faster than iTunes and its interface is easy to use. You can also customise the theme on the app; it’s not quite harkening back to the days of WinAmp skins, but it’s a nice-to-have. Apple Music Electron works on Windows and Linux, and you can download it from GitHub.

AppleMusic.com (web)

If you are tired of the Music app on your Mac, consider using Apple Music’s web interface. It’s not a major improvement over the app in any way, but the good thing is that you won’t have to wait for the app to load. You will lose some features — Apple Music’s web player doesn’t allow you to download songs or view lyrics — but that may not be a dealbreaker if you mostly play music in the background while you’re working.

If you don’t like Apple Music’s web interface, you can also try Thin Music or Fever Tunes, two other alternative web players for Apple Music that often load faster than Apple’s own website.