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Soor is a Better UI for Apple Music
Apple Music is a great app. It never feels neglected like some of Apple’s other stock apps (sorry Calculator). Yet the interface can sometimes feel…
Apple Music is a great app. It never feels neglected like some of Apple’s other stock apps (sorry Calculator). Yet the interface can sometimes feel a little stale. Soor is a third-party app that ties into Apple Music to present you with a refreshed UI focused on gestures and music discovery.
Launching Soor, all of your music is instantly available. It has tied into the Native Apple Music API which allows all of that content, from your library to your For You recommendations, to populate in the third-party app. Other than granting initial access, setup is supremely simple.
The navigation is what got me so hyped on the app at first. Apple Music’s gesture control is limited to swiping back and forth or perhaps occasionally swiping down to close an overlapping window. Soor is chock full of them. You can swipe up from the bottom to like a song or pull down and release from the top to close a window. Once familiar with the gestures, interacting with the app feels far more intuitive and quick.
Widgets are a big feature for Soor, going beyond any music player I’ve tried. The app has more than a dozen widget options in small, medium, and large sizes for you to choose from. They all borrow the Apple Music red gradient or opt for a darker black background for night mode users. Many of the widgets are informational such as promoting new releases, recently played music, your curated mixes, and more. But there are also Now Playing widgets which give you the current track, the artist, what is up next, and playback controls.
I said before how Soor focused on music discovery and it does so in a few ways. One way is by making the app more accessible. Recommended music is presented more easily so you can find something new. It will also send you push notifications for new releases from artists you love. The other way is by creating Magic Mixes. Using hundreds of parameters, you’re able to create Magic Mixes of music to find exactly the songs you want to hear.
Another useful feature is sorting your music. There are seemingly endless sorting and filtering options to dive down through your own music. Other great features are the trio of themes, always-accessible universal search, and the artwork visualizer.
This is a classic case of Apple delivering a great product in Apple Music but a third party taking it one step further. This is a premium solution to get the most from your Apple Music subscription with new features and enhancements rolling out regularly.
But enough about other people's apps.
