My favorite app for listening to music on my mobile offers me the best of Spotify but for free and without advertising.

I admit it: I’m a rat. I have a hard time opening my wallet for certain things, especially subscriptions. In fact, even though I’m a paying Amazon Prime user (it just rents to me), I swallow the ads on Prime Music and also on Spotify. I don’t mind hearing ads every now and then, but there are other limitations like the music being random or not being able to listen to a particular song that do bother me.

That’s why the first time I heard about Spotube, I didn’t think twice and installed it without paying anything or resorting to alternative stores. Normally I use iPhone, but since this app is only available for Android, I gave it a chance and at the moment it is so important on some occasions that it is even decisive for me when choosing the phone I use or carry with me. What makes Spotube so good?

Spotube combines the best of Spotify and YouTube

Spotube is an open source application (which you can view and modify if you wish thanks to its GitHub repository) and is available for free on the Google Play Store, two features that I personally appreciate a lot. The choice of its name is not accidental: mix Spotify and YouTube because that’s exactly how it worksusing the APIs of these services to combine them.

What you see under these lines is its interface which, although it is true that It’s not as well maintained or looks as modern as Spotifyit is well unders tood and it more than fills. In the lower area are the menus, where we find (in order): the main home screen, the search engine (the magnifying glass), access to the library and statistics. In fact, it is practically the same as Spotify.

Likewise, on this main screen we see genres and other categories to explore or highlight. In the magnifying glass we can search for a specific song, artist or album and in the library we will have access to our playlists, where we can filter them, use AI to generate one and extract our music locally (if we grant the appropriate permission). permission). Yeah, Spotube is fantastically comprehensive.

I talked about playlists and I want to come back to them because it is a key point: they are the same as those of Spotify because in fact in the configuration we can enter our account (or that of Last.fm) if we wish. In this way, what i recorded on spotify i have on spotube. For me it’s essential because I’ve been using Spotify for years and therefore save many playlists. Of course, as promised above, without ads and being able to choose which song I play.

Reading this, you might think that this is some kind of shady app that bypasses Spotify and nothing could be further from the truth: it uses its APIs to get data like the Top 50 hits by country or playlists, but it doesn’t read them through Spotify, but rather uses YouTube. In other words, it uses the Spotify database so that when we choose a song, it goes to YouTube and gets the audio. All this happens in the background, so you don’t see anything.

This, yes, It’s not as fast as Spotify for changing songsbut with good bandwidth and coverage, it’s nothing dramatic and on a personal note, it’s worth the few seconds of waiting in exchange for all I get: free, ad-free music on demand. To ask for something, I’d like it to be available for Android Auto, it was at one point, but at the moment the car’s infotainment system doesn’t display the app on the console. Too bad, but in that scenario I’ll always have ViMusic.