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The latest version of the Google Play Music Android app comes with no bundled APK for Android Wear devices, consequently losing some weight and being just over 15MB instead of nearly 17.5MB in size. Bundled Android Wear support was scrapped not long after Google managed to develop a solution that allows it to bring one of the main features of Android Wear 2.0 to devices that don’t support its latest wearable platform, having recently debuted standalone app support for pre-Android Wear 2.0 gadgets. While that move was originally announced in late August, individual apps still need to free themselves of bundled Android Wear 1.0 APKs in order to directly benefit from it, which is precisely what Google Play Music now did.
The significantly lighter build of the app comes with the version number 8.5, suggesting a notable change from the previous 8.0 variant of the service. Apart from unbundling the now-unnecessary Android Wear APK, the latest revision of Google Play Music also comes with significantly improved support for adaptive icons in Android Oreo. Prior to the update, using Google Play Music shortcuts as adaptive icons would result in a mixture of app icon styles and most of the icons appearing as fairly small depictions of the app’s sections they were supposed to denote. The newly revamped set of graphics has been optimized for use with Android 8.0 Oreo and later iterations of Google’s mobile operating system, featuring enlarged icons with no circular gray backgrounds placed on top of square white backdrops.
Google’s official changelog detailing the new build of Google Play Music only mentions that the software package ships with new bug fixes but doesn’t elaborate on the matter. The app itself still features the very same design that some vocal users have been advocating for replacing in recent times and while it’s currently unclear whether Google is truly working on such an overhaul, some of its other mobile services recently started receiving similar revamps. The new build of Google Play Music started rolling out late Monday and should soon be available for download in all parts of the world. Refer to the Google Play Store banner below to check whether the app can already be updated in your country.