Shazam for Android has updated its home screen widget. With it, you can now identify music playing around you without ever launching the app.
- What’s happening? Apple’s released version 3.17 of Shazam for Android with a refreshed widget that lets you identify music without leaving the home screen.
- Why care? Shazam’s widget in older versions of the app was just a shortcut to launch the app. You couldn’t Shazam a song right from the home screen.
- What to do? Update your copy of Shazam [Play Store link] to get the new widget.
Shazam a song right from the Android home screen
The new widget, redesigned for Google’s Material You styling in Android 12 and 13 with Dynamic Color theming supported, makes it a cinch to start a listening session.
A quick touch of the widget’s Tap to Shazam button will immediately start the listening process in the background. If there’s a match, you’ll see the song, artist and album artwork displayed within your Shazam widget.
You’ll also receive a Shazam notification that lets you quickly share the song. Again, at no point does this process require the user to interact with the app itself.
This widget is less disruptive for fast and casual song identification where you don’t want to leave what you’re doing. You can make a quick ID and then dive into it another time with the alert in the notification shade.
The updated widget is roomier (5×1) than before (1×1) and can now occupy the entire screen. Read: How to Shazam music playing on your iPhone
Will Shazam’s iOS widget become more useful?
With this update, Shazam has one cool feature that the iOS version lacks—a much more useful widget. This is especially interesting because Shazam is owned by Apple though hardly surprising giving a non-interactive nature of iOS widgets.
On iOS, widgets act as shortcuts to specific sections within their app. An iOS widget displays snippets of information but touching any section of a widget will instantly take you to the widget’s app. So, for example, a Gmail widget won’t let you delete a message or mark all messages as read without opening the Gmail app.
On Android, home screen widgets are a bit more useful—which is why Shazam for Android can identify music and show you a result without actually opening the app.
On the other hand, being owned by Apple has some advantages to it. For example, Shazam is universally available via Siri across Apple devices. And by adding Shazam to the Control Center of your iPhone, you can identify music that’s playing in apps, through headphones and so on.
As of right now, Shazam’s iOS widget is not interactive and only displays your recently found songs. It probably won’t become smarter until a future iOS update brings more interactivity to widgets. Read: How to get live song lyrics with Shazam