After trying almost every other music streaming service out there, I recently switched to Apple Music. While iTunes serves as a great app to access Apple Music on macOS, the official Apple Music app for Android leaves a lot to be desired. Worse, I realized that I was unable to download songs for offline playback in Apple Music on Android for some reason as the downloads kept getting stuck or stalled for no reason whatsoever.

A little bit of digging revealed that this is a particularly common issue. Hundreds of Android users have posted on Apple’s support forum complaining about not being able to download music for offline playback in Apple Music on their smartphone. Turns out, the issue is due to the official Apple Music app being done very poorly and not adhering to the Android app development guidelines.

Skipping the jargon, if you are simply interested in getting Apple Music to download songs for offline playback on your Android device, follow the steps below.

The issue seems to be primarily affecting Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL and other Android devices running Android 9.0 Pie. However, if you are facing the same issue on an Android device running Oreo or lower, feel free to try the steps below.

Step 1: On your Android device, go to Settings -> Apps & notifications -> See all apps. From the list of installed apps, select Apple Music.

Step 2: Under Permissions, you will see that it says no permissions have been granted to the app. This is the reason behind the downloads stalling and the app not working as intended. Apple’s engineering team has not followed the permission model of Android properly due to which the app never asks for the storage permission.

Step 3: Proceed to tap on Permissions and then grant the app all the three permissions listed: Contacts, Storage, and Telephone. After this, close the Apple Music app if it is running in the background and proceed to restart your device.

Now, open the Apple Music app again and proceed to download music for offline playback. This time around, the download will not stall and complete depending on how fast your internet connection is.

If the above steps do not work, you can also download the latest beta (v2.7.0) of Apple Music and sideload it on your Android device. You will still have to go through the above steps but the latest beta is more stable in nature and should fix any other bugs that you might be facing.

If the guide helps solve your issue, drop a comment and let us know about it!