Additionally, the company is adding support for playback control on other devices, direct from the Spotify app on-wrist. So users can access Spotify Connect and pause, play, or skip music, podcasts, and more. That’s from their smartwatches rather than smartphones.
How do you download music and podcasts to your Wear OS watch via Spotify?
Now, put more concisely, Spotify is giving Premium tier users access to downloads. But Free users will still be able to stream in Shuffle Mode over Wi-Fi or mobile data on their wearables too. And getting started really couldn’t be much easier. First, users need to have the Spotify app on their smartwatch running the Android-based Wear OS. Then, they simply need to use the app to look for music, podcasts, or whatever else they want to download — or listen to, for free-tier users. From there, a “Download to watch” option should be available. Once downloaded, those will be found in the “Downloads” section of the watch app. To help users further, Spotify is marking playlists, albums, and podcasts that are downloaded with a green arrow icon. But, in any case, from there it’s just a matter of making sure headphones are connected to the watch and then listening can commence. No smartphone is needed.
This won’t be limited to new watches, thankfully
One of the biggest details included in Spotify’s announcement may be the fact that this will support a wide range of smartwatches. More directly, it’s going to be supported on all wearables running Wear OS 2.o or newer. That’s as opposed to being limited to Wear OS 3. And that’s good news for end-users. The latest version of the smartwatch operating system from Google won’t necessarily be widely supported. At least not for quite some time. By supporting Wear OS 2.0 or newer, Spotify is effectively giving downloads and streaming to all current watches.
