What is this? Update Monday? Google's updates are becoming so prolific they cannot be contained by a single day of the week. Today the slow rollout of Google Play Music v5.6 has started, but before you get your hopes up, it's not a huge update. And no, it's not #materialyolo. There are still some notable changes, though.
What’s New
- New switch in navigation slide-out to toggle between on-device and all music (moved from action bar dropdown)
- New account switcher UI
- Support for Android TV casting
- New empty download queue UI
- No longer works with Cheapcast
- Authorized devices now (sort of) categorized
- Device limits now set to maximum of 5 phones (still 10 overall)
Left: Old, Right: New
The headliner here is probably the change to device authorizations. You still get 10 devices, which you can deauthorize as needed, but only five of them can be phones. The rest can be any mix of computers, tablets, and other devices. The new sorted device list isn't populating correctly yet – phones other than the current one aren't showing up under phones. This is probably to limit sharing of streaming accounts. The Android TV support is interesting too, but there are only a few developer devices in existence and they don't work very well. Oh well, cheers to the future.
New
Old
Download
The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.
File name: com.google.android.music-5.6.1608P.1252217.apk.
Version: 5.6.1608P.1252217 (Android 2.3+).
MD5: 0ac9049eb6fb797fa00d4386309aee44.
[Thanks, Mike L]