Last week the Russian search giant launched an Android app for its Yandex.Music service. The news from Yandex came just one day after an Android app with similar features was officially announced by Mail.Ru Group — Yandex’s arch-rival on the Russian Internet scene — for its Moi Mir social network.
The search giant claims its Yandex.Music is now the only legal music streaming service in Russia that features both a web version and mobile apps for the two most popular mobile operating systems, Android and iOS.
Yandex.Music for Android, as well the revamped iOS app with the same name, allows users to listen to audio tracks stored on their phones or on Yandex’s cloud storage platform Yandex.Disk. The app also enables users to access the entire online catalogue of the service, which contains 8.5 million songs. The latter feature is subscription-based and costs up to $6.40 (199 rubles) per month.
Among additional features that are included are music recognition, a song suggestions engine, and a “radio” function that lets listeners fine-tune their playlists using genre and language filters. Any audio track can be downloaded and stored on the the user’s phone for offline listening.
Yandex.Music for Android is available for users in the company’s key regions: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The company has been working on mobile music streaming services since last year. Its first toe in the water, the Yandex.Music app for iOS, was launched in May 2012 and has generated more than 700,000 downloads to date.
What Mail.Ru Group has to offer
The Android app announced by Mail.Ru Group yesterday is aimed solely at the users of the company’s social network, Moi Mir (Russian for “My World”). As of January 2013, it attracted 33.2 million monthly visitors in Russia between the ages of 12- and 64-years-old, according to the market research company TNS.
The app, called ‘Moi Mir Mail.Ru,’ allows users to listen to music that they or other users of Moi Mir have uploaded, and also offers advanced photo sharing and editing features. Although the official launch took place yesterday, the app seems to be available in Google Play since mid-April and has already been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Earlier this month, Mail.Ru Group launched a similar app for iOS.
