Downloads and offline

What the on-device mark actually means

One check decides it, for both the per-row arrow and the whole-album button: a track counts as on-device if it’s a local file, or a server track whose local twin was matched (see When you have both), or something you downloaded. It’s deliberately one rule — two separate marks could someday disagree with each other, so there’s only ever one to check.

Downloading a whole album, not twelve menus

A single track downloads from its row menu. A whole album downloads from the album hero itself, in the same circle as play and shuffle — outline until you tap it, filled once every track is actually on the device. Local tracks are excluded from that count entirely, since downloading a file that’s already on your phone would just copy it onto itself.

Covers travel with the music

Cover art used to be fetched from the server every time it was shown — fine, until the server is the thing you can’t reach. Download three albums before a flight, and every one used to render blank the moment you boarded: the audio was safely on your phone, but the only copy of the sleeve was on a server you’d left at home.

The art now downloads alongside the audio, one file shared by every track on the album rather than a copy per track. It’s fetched last and fails silently on purpose: a cover that doesn’t make it leaves you a track that plays with a missing picture, which is a better failure than a download that stops entirely for the sake of an image.