Apple Music on Android has always felt like a polite guest in someone else’s house, and version 7.0 is the clearest sign yet that Apple wants it to look like it came from Cupertino. After a month in beta, the update is now rolling out widely through the Play Store, bringing the Liquid Glass design language from iOS to Google’s platform.
The first change most people will notice is the icon. The familiar red tile is gone, replaced by a music note in black or white that follows your device theme. Red has also been dropped as the app’s accent colour, with blue taking over throughout the interface. For a service that has leaned on red as part of its identity for years, it’s a surprisingly bold shift.
Navigation now sits in a floating bottom bar, with the mini-player detached from it rather than docked underneath. Both carry a slight translucency, though it’s subtle enough that you’ll mostly just make out solid colours passing beneath. Anyone expecting the full glassy effect seen on iPhones may be underwhelmed, and the bar doesn’t shrink into a compact form while scrolling the way it does on iOS. The app does finally embrace Android’s edge-to-edge layout for the status and navigation bars, which makes it feel far less dated.
Elsewhere, top bars place the page title alongside the overflow menu, with the three-dot buttons now sitting in circular containers. The Library tab tucks its pin and category editing tools into that menu, and the Settings page has been regrouped to make it easier to scan. Artist pages see the biggest overhaul, with backgrounds that take their colour from cover art, a larger play button, an info page and a share option moved to the top corner, all closely mirroring iOS. Now Playing remains largely untouched, as it did on iPhone.
Apple has also aligned its version numbers across platforms, so 7.0 on Android corresponds to iOS 27. That small detail says a lot about the strategy. Apple Music has been on Android since 2015, and it now sits alongside Spotify and YouTube Music as a serious cross-platform option, so feature and design parity matters for subscribers who don’t live entirely inside Apple’s ecosystem.
The interesting tension is visual. Android’s own Material 3 Expressive design takes a very different approach, and Apple bringing its own look rather than adapting to Google’s means the app will stand out, for better or worse. Whether Android users see that as polish or as a foreign object on their home screen may decide how well this redesign is received.
