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Spotify’s new Wear OS app brings Connect features, better controls

Spotify’s new Wear OS app brings Connect features, better controls

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Spotify announced today that it’s rolling out a new Wear OS app in the coming week. The standalone Wear OS app is a vast improvement over the previous Spotify app for Android Wear, which left so much to be desired that users were relying on third-party apps to play their music through the streaming service. The new Spotify for Wear OS brings better controls for music playback and browsing playlists. Most importantly, it adds Spotify Connect features that let you play music from your connected speakers.

The UI remains pretty minimal, with options to pause or skip tracks and rewind 15 seconds if you’re listening to a podcast. You can access recently played tracks, and there’s a little heart icon that lets you save tracks to playlists. The app works with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and LTE, so you can listen to music and podcasts from your phone, laptop, Sonos speakers, or any other device you have set up with Spotify Connect. Unlike the Spotify app for Samsung Gear, though, it doesn’t yet have offline playback.

With this news, Spotify has also announced a partnership with Fossil to preinstall the app on Fossil Gen 4 smartwatches and Michael Kors Access Runway smartwatches starting in November. You can download Spotify on Google Play here.