A few years ago, the Cupertino company was looking for an engineer to develop new multimedia apps for Windows, so they make it very clear that other systems matter very little to them. They are only interested in keeping their closed ecosystem running smoothly. Apart from that, they have simply released some essential apps for other systems, such as iTunes, among others. But now Cider also arrives for Windows and Linux, and not only macOS and iOS/iPadOS users will be able to enjoy it.
cider is a open source project. It is not a native app as such, since it is an implementation of Electron-based Apple Music. Despite this inconvenience, it offers an infinitely superior experience to what Apple offers users outside of Mac. And the best thing is that you can download it from the Microsoft Store, via winget, as well as in packages Flatpack from Flathub, and even Cider is coming to some distro repos.
Cider (Apple Music under Electron) comes to Linux to offer all those wonders in terms of experience. Some of the advantages that this app has are:
- Speed and lightness despite being based on Electron.
- Graphic interface quite well maintained, intuitive and highly usable.
- It has all the features you need and more, from a panel to see the lyrics of your favorite songs, to functions to synchronize playbacks with your Apple Music account, Last.fm integration, support for video and podcasts, etc.
- It is highly customizable and extensible, so you can change the look of the client with themes, install add-on plugins, etc.
- Integrates with Discord.
- It offers support for equalizer and spatial audio.
- Great alternative to official Apple Music.
- Now the experience will be much better than what Apple Music offers on Windows, and now also on Linux.
- Unlike the official Apple app, Cider is open source.
On the other hand, there are also some disadvantages in cider:
- Apple wants you to use its official app, so it limits the quality to third-party clients. Therefore, the quality will be limited to 256 kbps maximum.
- It might stop working if Apple doesn't like Apple Music being used through third-party apps.