gMusic brings Google Play Music All Access to iOS

If you’ve signed up to take advantage of the discounted pricing for Google Play Music All Access, you may have noticed that there is no official app available for iOS devices. But just because Google isn’t supporting iOS doesn’t mean third-party developers aren’t. Enter gMusic, one of the better Google Play Music apps available for the platform.

The app was originally built to support Google’s music locker service. When All Access was launched, the developer behind the app quickly got to work to include Google’s on-demand streaming service. You can access the service inside gMusic by jumping over to the “Web” section of the app, or check out All Access’s radio feature in the “Radio” section.

I sent a few tweets back and forth with the app’s developer, who also runs the @gMusicApp Twitter account. According to this developer (who hasn’t given me a name to use yet), Google did not help with any of the All Access implementation in the app — it was all one person running on “lots of Mountain Dew.” The speed at which gMusic added All Access is impressive on its own, but to think that one person was responsible? Remarkable.

It begs the question, though — where is Google’s official app? I mean, here we are, a year and a half after Google Music opened up, and Google still does not have an official Google Music app for iOS, in spite of having apps for everything from Gmail to Google Translate. And now Google has launched this streaming service that, at the moment, seems to compete mainly with Spotify — yet Spotify is cross-platform and Google Play Music All Access is not.

And don’t even get me started on that long name. But we’ll save that for another time.

You can download the gMusic app for iOS from the App Store. The app includes support for the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad, and yes, the iPad version has a tablet-specific design. The app costs $1.99, but if you’re trying to lock in that $7.99 a month price for GPMAA, that two bucks is probably worth it.