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Pandora Introduces Standalone Apple Watch App, Stream Music and Podcasts With No iPhone Required

Pandora this week introduced a standalone Apple Watch app that allows you to stream music and podcasts from your wrist with no iPhone required.

Starting with ‌watchOS 6‌, developers are able to distribute apps built specifically for the ‌Apple Watch‌, without a companion app on iOS. These apps can be downloaded from the new App Store app on watchOS 6.

pandora apple watch app
Acquired by SiriusXM in 2018, Pandora is a streaming music service in the United States that features free, ad-supported radio. The service also offers two paid tiers, including Pandora Plus with personalized, ad-free radio for $4.99 per month and Pandora Premium with on-demand music and podcasts for $12.99 per month.

(Thanks, Stefan Constantine!)

Related Roundup: Apple Watch 11
Tag: Pandora
Buyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)

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Top Rated Comments

V_Man Avatar
82 months ago

I can't even make it through a day on my series 4 watch & I just play music on my phone. There's no hope for my watch if I start playing music with this app.
What do you do with your watch? I can get almost 2 days on my series 4
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
82 months ago
Didn’t know pandora was still a thing.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
adambomb78 Avatar
82 months ago
I can't even make it through a day on my series 4 watch & I just play music on my phone. There's no hope for my watch if I start playing music with this app.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
82 months ago
No Spotify offline playback - no buy.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
sjinsjca Avatar
82 months ago
This will be really nice for when I'm out for a run since I leave my phone behind.
I haven't been able to get it to work over a cell connection. Over WiFi, it works well, though it got into a mode where it would only act as a remote for my iPhone app. I turned off the phone, delete the app from the Watch, re-downloaded it from the Watch App Store, and it returned to autonomous functionality. I hope it doesn't make a habit of switching to remote-only functionality.

UPDATE:

Ugh, it does.

I had it streaming via WiFi with my phone turned off. Turned phone back on, no problem. Turned phone back off, the Watch app stopped streaming and refuses to re-start, presenting me with:



There appears to be no way to get the app running independently again. Force-killing it doesn't help.

So, Pandora still has some work to do.

Attachment Image
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
82 months ago
Nice. I had to explicitly download the new app version from the watch app store, then login with my Pandora credentials. Nice that the watch lets you use the phone for keyboard input.

It appears to still work in the classic mode where the watch app serves as a remote control for the app running on the phone. That'll be handy.

Put phone into airplane mode and tried it out. Worked well over wifi connection.

This will be really nice for when I'm out for a run since I leave my phone behind.



Can you cache music or stations to a WiFi only watch?
You've sort of been able to do that already with Pandora on your phone downloading content for your top stations to your watch. Hasn't really worked very well IMHO with it being pretty thin in how much content I'd see come across, and no way to specify which stations I wanted it to download to the watch. Perhaps they've updated that with the new version.

BTW - it appears the standalone works over wifi. Could be handy at the gym if you can connect watch to their wifi and prefer not to have your phone with you.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)