You only realise how bad the experience with Apple apps is on non-Apple platforms when you get an Apple device. To be honest, Apple Music on my Android phones, and on iTunes in Windows, cannot be compared to Apple Music on my iPad. Things are almost worlds apart. And it is all, I believe, Apple’s fault they can’t be bothered to make things better.

On Android, things can fail at any instance. For example on my Note 10+, Apple Music remains on the notification bar, until I hit force stop to forcibly remove it. I’ve tried to go fix the issue myself under Notifications, but nothing works. When Apple recommended Playlists are updated, it will take forever for them to load. I love the 25 songs “FOR YOU” Apple curates every Tuesday under Favourite’s. But that can fail to appear on my phone. Sometimes my library fails to load, and I have to reset the whole app, including losing all downloaded music. And this is something that happens almost every other week.

On Windows, iTunes is just too heavy. It takes forever to load. Finding things is impossible because the UI is just plain stupid. Even though installation is now much easier, with the Microsoft Store App, things are still so slow. Scrolling will take forever sometimes. There will be unexplained line breaks on the screen. Saving songs to Playlists, or hitting LOVE ♥ on songs you like, will be very annoying you’ll just resort to using your phone because things will be better there.

Funny thing is since getting the iPad Pro, none of these issues arise. Everything works so smoothly, and so easily. Which means Apple just doesn’t have the time to bother with user experience on other platforms. That’s why on Android and Windows things will constantly annoy you. But thanks goodness, they’re working on an easy way to access Apple Music on the web. So that no matter which platform you’re on, you’ll be able to get one experience. Check out beta.music.apple.com.

I love using it on my laptop. It means I don’t have to open iTunes which just sucks. It means I don’t have to have many tasks running on the PC, just my Microsoft Edge browser with some tabs open. It means better battery life because Edge Browser is just perfect now with Chromium. It means an easier life.

Currently, it works really well for a platform in beta. The quality of the stream is quite good. Of course, you lose things like being able to save songs offline, but that shouldn’t matter if you always have an internet connection. Responsiveness of the site is also quite good. The only thing that don’t work well that I’ve noticed is saving to the Library doesn’t show you confirmation that action has been completed. But the overall experience is great. Try it out.