What happens when Spotify and Waze team up? You get music and navigation integration heaven.

Listening to music and driving to your destination go hand-in-hand so tightly, it's interesting that there isn't a single app that performs both roles together - until now that is. Spotify and Waze have now partnered to deliver a whole new level of integration never seen before and it's rolling out for Android users first.

We already see the option to enable Waze integration on our Spotify app, but no such equivalent on Waze yet, and at the time of writing, there isn’t an update for the navigation app on the Google Play Store. But we suppose it's just a matter of time for it to get updated as well.

The result of this integration? You can continue listening to your song while still getting navigational assistance without issues. You get sort of a ‘lite’ version of Waze in the Spotify app and a 'lite' version of Spotify in Waze. The latter is definitely useful, but it’s a single swipe away from getting the Spotify tray from the status bar anyway. On the other hand, the former may not be so useful because why would you have Spotify open and want a mini map when you’re driving unless you’re looking to browse your Spotify playlist while using Waze. But for a number of reasons, you shouldn’t. Chief among them is because you couldn’t anyway – the feature won’t work unless your car is at a complete stop, according to TechCrunch. Secondly, it’s dangerous enough that you’re devoting so much attention to selecting a playlist while driving – something that you should’ve sorted out before even starting the drive.

Prior to this when you had to rely on running two different apps and switch between them, sometimes one of the two will fail, causing the music app to just drop, or the navigation apps – especially Google Maps – to just notify you with bell tones instead of the full "in 3km, turn left" navigation notifications. The former can be annoying, but the latter doesn’t quite matter as you’ll still need to glance at the map to make sure you’re making the correct turn, as there can be a number of exits on a highway that are pretty close to one another.

All said and done, we're still impressed that such a partnership happened considering that Google owns Waze and also has a notable music service, but yet partnered an external audio streaming leader like Spotify to enhance the usability of both apps. We look forward to a more relaxed drive with this new integration and let's hope iOS users don't have to wait too long.

Source: TechCrunch.

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