Only a couple of weeks after announcing Amazon Cloud Player integration with Ford SYNC’s AppLink platform, the company has today updated its iOS application with native support for the Apple iPad. The new application isn’t remarkably different from the previously launched iPhone counterpart, so it’s unclear why it took a company with resources like Amazon’s around half a year to add this support. But doing so was a necessary step, as the competition for users’ digital dollars continues among the big players, including both Apple and Google, of course, as well as with newer streaming music startups like Spotify.
The Cloud Player iOS application debut last summer came a year after Amazon had first launched its music storage and streaming application, Amazon Cloud Player. At the time, the app worked on iPhone or iPod touch, offering users the ability to store up to 5 GB of music for free before purchasing additional storage. Today, the service separates its two tiers – free and premium – by songs. The free tier allows users to store 250 songs, while Premium users can add up to 250,000 songs for $25/year.
Songs purchased on Amazon either through its MP3 Store or automatically imported via Amazon’s new AutoRip service (which offers digital copies for physical music purchases), don’t count towards these storage totals.
In the updated iPad version, you can sort through your music by artists, albums, songs, genres, or playlists, and can switch between sections for “Cloud” and “Device,” the latter which allows users to play music they have stored locally for offline access. (You can download music from the Cloud section of the app to make it show up here). You can configure settings like whether or not Amazon should auto-add MP3 purchases, whether downloading and streaming should only work over Wi-Fi, the streaming cache size, and more. All these options are also available on the smaller-screen application, too.
The new iPad-optimized version of Cloud Player is part of a Universal iOS application for Apple devices, so if you were previously running the iPhone app on your iPad, you only have to fetch the update. New users can install Amazon Cloud Player for iPad from here.
Amazon already supported Android phone and tablet versions of Cloud Player, which are available both in Google Play and in Amazon’s own Appstore.
