60 Second App Review – Y Music

Price – Free

Ads – No

IAP – Yes (voluntary donation)

Rating – 8/10

One of the biggest bugbears of listening to music on YouTube (yes, that’s what the Y stands for) is the screen off, sound off problem. Even backing out the app is enough to pause playback. To address this issue and a couple of others, Google started a subscription service called YouTube Red. Red leader lets the video keep playing in the background when you are in other apps, it allows video to be downloaded to you device, it skips any ads and it gives you access to original Red squadron content. Y Music doesn’t give you everything Red does, but it’s not far away.

First things first, Y Music obviously doesn’t integrate with the YouTube app, so you don’t have a seemless experience. Instead you are using a seperate app, so you won’t be signing into your YouTube account either. The app has three pains, the search page, the downloaded music page and a playlist one.

Once you search for a song you can either play from the results list, download the audio/video or even open in the YouTube app. The download quality settings are limited with a max res of 640×360 and if you want mp3 then there is an online conversion proccess. Tunes can be sent to Y Music using Androids sharing intent if you prefer to search for songs and playlists there.

Don’t ever expect to see the app on the Play Store due to what it does. To install you need to download from XDA Developers and install manually (remember to turn on unknown sources first). The app is still in development so expect the odd bug, and remember that to update you will need to keep an eye on the XDA thread and do it manually.