Review: Rdio Android App

If you're an Rdio fan with an Android phone, you've been on the losing end of things for quite some time – stuck with a clunky mobile app and waiting around for a long-promised refresh. Meanwhile, Rdio's players for iPhone and iPad are slick and pretty, and have been for many months.

Well good news for you: The streaming music service has just released a completely redesigned Android app that fixes all of the little annoyances.

As of Monday, the new version of the free Rdio player is available in the Android market and as an update for existing users. If you're an Rdio subscriber, you should download it immediately. If you're not a subscriber, you can try out the service free for a week before biting the bullet – the $10-a-month plan gives you unlimited streaming to any device (including your mobile) and the $5-a-month plan restricts you to only listening from your PC's desktop.

Rdio offers native apps for all the major mobile platforms, as well as an excellent web-based player. But the iPhone and iPad apps in particular are elegant and easy to use, and they really stand out among streaming players for mobiles. So, it's odd that the Android app has lacked polish for so long. It played music just fine, but the old version was missing key features found in its iOS counterparts, like some of the social discovery tools and a strong search engine.

I first caught a sneak peek of Rdio's new Android app at CES in January. Last week, the company gave me a pre-release build to test, and I'm happy to report it's been improved in every way. The fit and finish of the UI now closely resembles the iOS versions. On the main navigation screen, all the top-level menu items are laid out in a simple grid of icons, much like the home screen of Facebook's mobile apps. There's a new icon for new releases and one for recommendations. Searching and browsing the results are greatly improved. There's a new persistent player – the widget that pops up from the bottom of the screen with a single tap from anywhere in the app, bringing up the current track and all the player controls. If you're running Ice Cream Sandwich, the player's controls and the album art will show up on your lock screen, so you can skip tracks or pause the audio without unlocking the device.

The split between Spotify and Rdio among my friends is just about half-half. Both services are the same price, they're closely matched on selection (though neither has everything), they both do playlists well, and both let you sync songs for offline listening.

For me, the music discovery features and the attention to UI design are the big reasons I chose Rdio over Spotify. But I'm primarily an iOS user, and I doubt I would have subscribed to the service if I'd been stuck using the old Android player all the time. Now that the Android app is on par with the iPhone app, maybe more people will be drawn to it.