Spotify’s ‘Community’ mobile hub: see what friends are listening to, iOS users can access it now
Image Credit: Protocol
Spotify’s ‘Community’ hub is a new feature coming to the platform. It’ll provide a social hub of sorts that’ll allow mobile users to see what music their friends are enjoying and what playlists they’re updating too.
While you can currently see what your friends are listening to via the “Friend Activity” tab on the desktop app, there is no similar feature on the Spotify mobile app.
Spotify’s new ‘Community’ hub for social music streaming
In its early years, Spotify leveraged Facebook integration while aiming to be a social music streaming app. But as time went on, the platform doubled down on user personalistion to get ahead of the competition. As a result, today we can lose ourselves in playlists customised to our musical tastes – ‘Discover Weekly’ and ‘Release Radar’ being just two infamous examples.
But Spotify has had no recent plans to further leverage any social features besides ‘Friend Activity’ on its desktop app, despite a user request receiving over 7,000 votes on its community forums.
Until now.
Spotify’s Community feature isn’t accessible in the mobile app right now, but mobile iOS users can access the upcoming feature today by searching “spotify community” in the Safari browser on their device.
Chris Messina was the first to spot this and shared his findings via a screen recording on Twitter earlier this month, in addition to a bunch of other Spotify updates too.
The layout of the Community hub presents a horizontal row of ‘Playlist Updates’ at the top of the page. Beneath these, you can scroll through a vertical list of friends to see what they’re listening to with timestamps that tell you when they were listening. And if your friends are listening as you scroll you’ll see a graphical speaker to the right of their choice of music which sits beneath their name. Unfortunately, tapping on a song friend’s song name doesn’t play the song as of yet. but I imagine that will be an addition to the feature when it’s publicly available to all mobile users.
Furthermore, Spotify has added timestamps to the playlist updates in an updated version of Community. Now you can see the most recent playlist additions! Additionally, you can tap on the playlists to see the full song list too.