I confess: I am a mouse. I have a hard time opening my wallet for certain things, especially subscriptions. In fact, even though I am a paid user of Amazon Prime (it just rents me), I swallow ads on Prime Music and Spotify. I don’t mind hearing ads from time to time, but it’s true that other limitations bother me, like the randomness of the music or not being able to listen to a specific song.

So when I first heard about Spotube, I didn’t think twice and installed it without paying any fees or having to go to alternative stores. I normally use an iPhone, but since this application is only available for Android, I tried it and now it is so important in some cases that it even determines for me which phone to use or take with me. What makes Spotube so good?

Spotube combines the best of Spotify and YouTube

Spotube is an open source app (you can view and modify it using its GitHub repository if you want) and is available for free on the Google Play Store, two features that I personally really appreciate. The choice of its name is no coincidence: Mix Spotify and YouTube because that’s just how it worksusing the APIs of these services to combine them.

What you see below these lines is its interface; although this is true It doesn’t look as well-maintained and modern as Spotifyis well understood and more than satisfactory. In the lower area are the menus we find (in order): the main home screen, the search engine (magnifier), access to the library and statistics. In fact, it is almost identical to Spotify.

Similarly, on this home screen we see genres and other categories to explore or highlight. In the magnifying glass we can search for a specific song, artist or album and in the library we can access our playlists, where we can filter them, use artificial intelligence to create one and pull our music locally (if we give the relevant permission). Spotube is completed in a great way.

I mentioned the playlists and I want to go back there because it is an important point: they are the same as those of Spotify because in fact in the configuration we can enter our own account (or the Last.fm account) if we want. So, My recordings on Spotify are available on Spotube. This is very important to me because I have been using Spotify for years, so I save a lot of playlists. Of course, as I promised above, without ads and being able to choose which track to play.

Reading this, one might think that this is some kind of shady app that bypasses Spotify, and nothing could be further from the truth: it uses its APIs to get data like the top 50 songs by country or playlists, but it doesn’t play them through Spotify, instead it uses YouTube. So it uses Spotify’s database, so when we select a song, it goes to YouTube and gets the audio. We don’t see anything because all this is done in the background..

Yes definitely, Not as fast as Spotify when changing songsbut with good data speeds and coverage, it’s nothing dramatic, and on a personal note, it’s worth waiting a few seconds for in exchange for everything I get: free, ad-free on-demand music. If I have to ask, I’d love for this to be available for Android Auto as well, it was at one point, but right now the car’s infotainment system doesn’t show the app on the console. It’s a shame, but in that scenario I’ll always have ViMusic.

Spottube

An open source, ad-free music streaming app that combines Spotify and YouTube

Download for free

Cover | Screenshot of the AI-powered Microsoft Copilot Designer and Mockuphone app

Xataka on Android | Neither Spotify nor YouTube Music. This app brings together the best of both worlds: free, Open Source and ad-free