Spotify gives its Android app's home screen separate feeds for Music and Podcasts & Shows to better highlight recommendations, will bring the change to iOS soon
Context & Ripple Effects
Spotify has spent years rebuilding its mobile home screen around discovery rather than navigation — it removed the hamburger menu back in 2016 (ditched the hamburger menu on iOS first), added a continually updating What's New feed for followed artists in 2021, and earlier this year began testing a vertically scrolling podcast feed with automatic 60-second previews inside the main app.
Today's change extends that arc: instead of one blended home screen, Android users get separate Music and Podcasts & Shows feeds so each format's recommendations surface on its own terms, with an iOS rollout promised soon.
First-order effects
- Android listeners now choose between two curated feeds, meaning podcast episodes no longer compete directly against album and playlist cards for the same home-screen slots.
Second-order effects
- Podcast publishers gain a dedicated recommendation surface where their shows are surfaced alongside other podcasts rather than buried under music tiles — raising the stakes for placement in Spotify's podcast algorithm specifically.
Third-order effects
- If the split holds through the iOS rollout, Spotify is structurally treating music and spoken-word as distinct discovery businesses with separate curation logic, a direction its earlier feed experiments already pointed toward.
The trend: Streaming apps are fragmenting the single home feed into format-specific surfaces, making per-format recommendation quality the new battleground.