ShareMyPlaylists Gets A Much Needed Android Reboot

“To be honest, it was awful”, says ShareMyPlaylists founder Kieron Donoghue on the company’s previous Android effort, which today gets a much needed reboot.

The new app brings many of the Spotify community site’s best features to Google’s platform, such as its editorally-picked ‘Featured Playlists’ as well as the ‘Top 50 Playlist Charts’. Although be warned: Android users need a premium Spotify account to join the fun.

Launched in 2009, ShareMyPlaylists.com claims to be the largest and oldest Spotify community site (it certainly feels like I’ve been covering the company for a very long time) and has published over 95,000 playlists for its users worldwide, while the site generates 15,000 playlists plays per-day and has over 300 new playlists uploaded daily.

Other features of the new Android app include seamless integration with Spotify’s own mobile app (hit play on any playlist in the ShareMyPlaylists app and the playlist will load in Spotify), the ability to browse by genre, playlist search, and social media sharing from within the app.

But back to Donoghue’s admission, which is something familiar to a lot of startups and older players alike as they struggle first time around to perfect the transition from desktop web to a native mobile app. Not only is the user experience required often entirely different, but so is the development process and skill-set, while there has been a tendency to rush out iOS and Android apps and ShareMyPlaylists’ original Android Market reviews are a testament to that.