Pandora’s iMessage App Lets You Start Radio Stations

Pandora released a revamped application yesterday for iOS and it also brings the company’s iMessage app. Pandora says that it’s actually the first third-party music streaming service to launch its own iMessage app. iOS 10 opens up iMessage to developers who can now create their own apps to enhance the messaging app’s functionality. Pandora’s iMessage app will enable users to start their own radio stations from within a chat.

Other music-related services have also launched their own iMessage apps. The Apple Music app enables users to share songs within iMessage while Shazam’s app enables users to detect songs from inside iMessage as well.

Pandora has taken a different approach. It enables users to second a 30-second sample in a chat. If recipients like the sample they can tap on it to create a Pandora artist station based on the shared track. This works significantly better when both parties in the chat have the Pandora app installed on their device but the recipient doesn’t need to be logged in to hear the sample.

Sharing songs is easy. Users just need to launch the iMessage app while they’re playing a Pandora station on their iPhone. The track that’s playing will immediately be listed under the “Now Playing” in the iMessage extension.

If you’d like to have these features in iMessage, update your Pandora app if you haven’t already, the revamped app is only compatible with devices running iOS 10.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: imessage, pandora