Spotify is Testing Displaying Friend Activity on Mobile

Spotify has started testing a new Community feature on its mobile app that will display the music your friends are listening to. Brining this social feature to the mobile app has been a popular request from Spotify users, and the company confirmed to Techcrunch that the new feature was in the early testing phases.

The Spotify desktop app already has a Friend Activity tab displaying the music your friends are listening to in real-time, though you can hide this tab in settings. The new Community tab in the Spotify mobile app works quite differently, at least at the moment. In screenshots shared by Chris Messina earlier this month, you can see that the Community tab has a row of recently updated playlists at the top, and the list of what your friends are listening to appears below.

“The feature doesn’t appear to be fully functional in our tests,” Techcrunch reported. “You can currently tap on the playlists to see the song list, but tapping on a friend’s music doesn’t let you play the song, too. That will likely change when or if the feature becomes publicly available.”

By default, Spotify lets anyone who follows you on the app see what you’re listening to in the desktop app. If you don’t want other users to know what you’re listening to, you can either start a Private Session or disable the option to share your listening activity in Settings.

In recent years, social features haven’t really been a priority for Spotify. The app encourages users to sign in with their Facebook account to build their social graph, though it’s still possible (though not really seamless) to search and follow other users manually. If you don’t have a Facebook account and use Spotify mostly on mobile, though, you may have missed the app’s social features entirely.