My favorite streaming music service is Apple Music. As an iPhone user, this was a match made in heaven. As a regular desktop Linux user, however, this was very problematic. You see, for the longest time, you needed iTunes to listen to Apple Music on desktop. This wasn't a problem when using Windows 10 or macOS, but as soon as I signed into, say, Ubuntu, I was out of luck, as there is no iTunes for Linux.

Thankfully, late last year, Apple finally brought its streaming music service to the web. In other words, all you needed to listen to Apple Music was a compatible web browser. This meant that users of desktop Linux could finally listen to the streaming service by simply firing up a web browser, such as Firefox. Despite being a feature Spotify offered for many years, it was still a really big deal. The problem? Apple Music for the web was merely a beta. Today, this changes.

Yes, starting today, you can simply visit https://music.apple.com/ rather than https://beta.music.apple.com/. All mentions of the word "beta" are gone, signaling it is no longer in a testing phase. This isn't just on Linux, but Windows and Mac too. Since many users of those operating systems despise iTunes, it is big news for them too -- Apple Music without the bloated iTunes!

Truth be told, I found Apple Music to be flawless while in beta when using Firefox on Ubuntu, but it is good to know that Apple is taking the web version seriously and won't be abandoning it any time soon. Quite frankly, it is refreshing that the company hasn't tried to block Linux users by detecting the user agent.

Are you excited that Apple Music on the web has exited beta? Please tell me in the comments below.

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