Pandora 4.0 for iPhone and iPad gets complete redesign and goes social

By Leanna Lofte
last updated

Pandora for iPhone and iPad received a huge update that includes a complete redesign and tight social integration. It still includes the same great ability to create personal stations of music that include your favorite artists and songs and similar music , but now you can share your latest discoveries to Facebook and Twitter, follow your friends, re-discover your favorite music on your profile page, get full lyrics, and more.

Pandora 4.0 features 4 main tabs: Stations, Feed, Profile, and Settings. From any of the tabs, you can quickly and easily get to the Now Playing screen where you can mark the song you're listening to with the thumbs up/down, pause, skip, and more. Tapping the button in the top right corner will you take you the current artist's page where you can explore and learn about the artist and track including biographies, album discographies, lyrics, and more.

New to Pandora 4.0 are the Feed and Profile tabs. In the feed, you'll see what your Pandora and Facebook friends are listening to, what they like and dislike, and listen to their stations. From your Profile, you'll basically see what information is being pushed out to your friends' feeds including what you're listening to, stations you've created, and who you've started following. You can also leave comments on profile pages.

Some of the other new features in Pandora 4.0 include a timer to the track progress indicator, support for the iPhone 5's larger display, support for BMW vehicles, and several stability and performance enhancements. It's also important to note that the iPad version has a bug that prevents iOS 6 users from using landscape mode. Pandora says they will release a fix shortly.

Pandora is is a free ad-supported music service. To drop the ads, you can subscribe to Pandora One for $3.99 per month and also enjoy higher quality audio, a desktop application, custom skins, and fewer interruptions.

So what do you think of the new Pandora? Personally, I find the new features and social integration to be a great addition, but I'm not a huge fan of the new look as it seems very basic and boring. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

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Leanna Lofte
Leanna Lofte

Former app and photography editor at iMore, Leanna has since moved on to other endeavors. Mother, wife, mathamagician, even though she no longer writes for iMore you can still follow her on Twitter @llofte.

15 Comments
  • $48 annually to get rid of the ads -- too expensive. There should at least be a mid-tier subscription that gets rid of the onscreen ads that occupy 50% of the screen on my iPhone 5. Leave the audio ads unless the subscriber wants to pay full subscription. And then there's the video ads -- chomping away like little pacmen at my data plan :-( Nothing more than a delivery system for advertisements.
  • If you want free, you live with ads. Someone has to get paid.
  • You're correct, up to a point. Now that they force streamed video ads -- I'm >paying< to view the advertisements. If I only used WiFi, it wouldn't matter -- but that's not the case. It would be more acceptable if video ad streaming only occurred if you had a WiFi connection.
  • Posted this on iMore's FB link, but had anyone Updated Pandora with a jailbreak an the Cydia unlimited skips/download/no ad tweak? I was curious if the tweak still worked ok. Didn't see any updates to the tweak in Cydia.
  • Yes, Pandora Downloader still works with the new update. I updated yesterday and have not had any problems with it.
  • Might be able to download (don't know don't care) and skip but ads are back >:(. Hopefully Cydia gets an update soon. I loathe ads.
  • No landscape view on iPad. Needs to be fixed.
  • Meh, don't care about the social network tie-ins. They should have made better use of the iPhone 5 screen. Without ads the album reflection is almost as big as the album cover. The album is also not aligned with the lockscreen album image. The time and other info should have gone at the top of the screen and be permanently shown on the iPhone 5. Wasted space otherwise. Poor update IMHO.
  • I have to agree with MrC's comment about not being a big fan of the social network tie-ins.
  • I dont find it boring at all. As far as Radio music player it is one of the best designed and less messy of them all. Simple might be boring to you, yet i prefer this much more to spotify app which is horribly designed and hard to navigate. Radio is nice looking yet it takes too much steps to do something as simple as looking for your music. Pandora i like because it keeps things focused and simple.
  • I don't get these apps. Why not just listen to mp3's in the ipod app?
  • ..
  • Seems to me that you only review the app on the iPhone
    The iPad app was left way behind, at least from what i got in my 1st gen iPad after upgrading to Pandora from the appstore just now.
  • This is the easiest way to get rid of ads and you dont even need to jailbreak which is handy, and its perfectly legal unlike others http://adstamp.blogspot.com.au/
  • Thanks for the article Leanna. For those who live outside US and want to access Pandora radio, you can use UnoTelly as I do to get around the geo block.