Grooveshark Back on the iPhone With HTML5 Web App

Popular music service Grooveshark has made its way back to the iPhone, thanks to the company’s new HTML web app. Grooveshark fans will be happy to hear that you can now access the free service on iOS devices without the jailbreak app.

Apple originally pulled Grooveshark from the App Store because of its questionably-illegal nature, and then app then showed up in Cydia for jailbreakers. Grooveshark has now abandoned Flash for a mobile-friendly HTML5 web app that all iOS users can enjoy.

If you’re unfamiliar with Grooveshark, the service is basically a mix of Spotify and Pandora With the new web app (html5.grooveshark.com), you can search for songs and play Pandora-like stations. Songs can be played in the background through Mobile Safari and the app’s UI scales nicely for the iPhone and iPad.

The Grooveshark selection isn’t as vast as what’s available on the iTunes Store, but those with a more mainstream taste in music shouldn’t have any trouble finding most of the tracks you’d expect. For unlimited access and no ads on mobile, you can get Grooveshark Anywhere for $9 per month.

This HTML5 app is an example of another company circumventing the curated nature of Apple’s App Store. Amazon recently launched a HTML5 web app for the iPad that allows customers to purchase Kindle ebooks. Apple didn’t let Amazon offer purchase links for ebooks in its native iOS app because it violated the App Store’s guidelines.

Let us know what you think of the new Grooveshark web app. Do you prefer it over apps like Spotify and Pandora?

[The Next Web]