Apps stream Google, Amazon music from the cloud

With last week’s launch of iCloud and the impending launch of iTunes Match, iPhone and iPad users will soon have a native way to play their music from the cloud. But while iTunes is dominant, Apple isn’t the only digital-music provider out there, and rival apps continue to pop up.

Interactive Innovations has joined the fray with two new offerings: gMusic, which streams tunes from your Google Music account, and aMusic, which does the same for songs stored with Amazon Cloud Drive.

The two new apps behave in similar fashion. gMusic allows access to up to 20,000 songs, though the developers haven’t disclosed the number for aMusic. Both apps allow you to create and edit playlists, and to search your music collection by artists, songs, albums, or genres. Each can play music while in the background, allowing iOS users to accomplish other tasks with musical accompaniment.

Interactive Innovations describes gMusic and aMusic as “the only native iOS app[s]” for Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive—although Google Music does allow iOS access through an HTML5 web page and Amazon provides a similar service for the iPad. Both aMusic and gMusic cost $2; each is compatible with any device running iOS 4.1 or later.