iPhone: The Missing Manual, 10th Edition

Chapter 9. Music & Videos

Of all the iPhone’s talents, its iPoddishness may be the most successful. This function, after all, gets the most impressive battery life (40 to 80 hours of playback, depending on the model). There’s enough room on your phone to store thousands of songs.

In iOS 10, the Music app got yet another huge annual makeover. Five tabs greet you across the bottom: Library, For You, Browse, Radio, and Search. In reaction to the howls of millions of customers who were baffled by the previous incarnation, Apple has radically simplified this app.

Note

This simplification means the loss of a few features. To save you hunting around for them, here are two of the missing: Genius playlists and playback history.

Some of them are useful only if you’ve subscribed to Apple Music, Apple’s $10-a-month music service—but not all of them. The Internet radio stations, for example, mean that you’ll never run out of music to listen to—and you’ll never pay a penny for it.

Note

If you’re not interested in paying for an Apple Music subscription, you can hide the two tabs that you’ll never use (For You and Browse). To do that, open Settings→Music and turn off Show Apple Music.

The For You and New tabs disappear—and a new tab, Connect, takes their place. This is the mini-rock-band Instagram service described in The Library Tab.

The bottom line: Your Music app might show you either of two different sets of tabs. omplicated? Yes. Anyway, this chapter is written as though you haven’t hidden the Apple ...