Yesterday, Swedish music service Spotify announced their application’s submission to Apple iTunes App Store. Spotify, which already boasts over 6 million users in Europe, is somewhat of an iTunes alternative – albeit with streaming tracks instead of downloads. However, the similarity between the two services leads some to believe that Apple, notorious for booting apps that duplicate iTunes functionality, won’t approve the new Spotify iPhone application. And in another example of Apple’s totalitarianism, the company also just pulled Google Voice and other third-party Google Voice applications from the App Store.
Luckily for jailbreakers, problems like those above are less of an issue. There’s currently an open source Spotify client app available for download and the third-party GV Mobile app for Google Voice is coming soon.
Spotify for iPhone Jailbreakers
Like the official Spotify iPhone client, the third party client app called Spot, available from Cydia, also requires a Premium account in order to work. Also like the official app, Spot lets you search for songs and build playlists. However, where the official client will let you cache playlists to listen to when the AT&T; network fails or you lose your connection, the Spot application has yet to implement this type of feature according to a forum posting. That’s a big drawback, unfortunately, since the caching ability is precisely what makes Spotify feel less like a streaming service and more like a real iTunes alternative.
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There’s also another major issue for jailbreakers here in the U.S. looking to get on board with Spotify – the premium account. In order to run Spot, you need a premium account to sign into the app. However, in order to get a premium account, you have to sign up at Spotify.com, a site which currently prevents you from doing so because Spotify is not available in this country yet. So what good is an open source app if you don’t have a premium account, right?
Fortunately, there are a few workarounds for this issue. For one, you could access the Spotify web site using a UK-based (or other European country-based) proxy server. A quick Google search presented us with several options for doing so, although we won’t point to any exact resources since this isn’t exactly the most legal way of going about things. Let’s just say this: we got to the sign up page and it was only a matter of putting in our name and account details.
Another option is to purchase an account from an overseas friend who has access to the service in their country. Have them purchase the account and you pay them back after they give you the username/password. (Obviously, you’d want to go with a real friend you trust here, not some random stranger from the internet.)
Either way, getting access to Spotify via Spot is a bit more difficult than we hoped it would be, but it’s not impossible if you’re really motivated.
GV Mobile Coming to Cydia
Although there aren’t any Google Voice alternatives available just yet, we hear that one in particular is coming soon. The third-party client application GV Mobile was among the Google Voice apps just pulled from the App Store. According to a tweet from the developer Sean Kovacs, he plans to upload the latest version of the application to Cydia (“or similar”…perhaps referring to Icy) soon. You may want to follow his Twitter account for more details as to when that occurs.
For more details on jailbreaking, check out our how-to guide here.
