The Spotify Android application has been updated to version 0.3.24. The upgrade brings two major new features, as well as a bunch of smaller improvements to the client, which we rated as better than the iPhone version.

The biggest feature of the release is a homescreen widget that allows users to control playback and view album artwork without having to open the Spotify app. Most other music apps, including Last.fm and the default music player, have homescreen widgets for the Android platform.

The other major addition is the ability to click Spotify links in the Android browser and have them open (mostly) as you'd expect on your device. More specifically, track, album and custom playlist links reportedly work perfectly, but artist and label searches don't do anything.

The player itself has been tweaked a little - you can now swipe left and right on the album art to skip forward or backward between tracks that are queued up. This means, however, that the forward/back/play buttons are now always displayed over the artwork, partially obscuring it. There doesn't appear to be a way to hide them any more.

Performance has increased too, and prospective Motorola Milestone/Droid owners will be pleased to hear that Spotify on Android now fully supports Android 2.0, so you won't have any problems using the app on updated handsets.

This update seems to fix almost all of the issues we highlighted for Android in our showdown between the Spotify apps on both platforms. Do you prefer the Android app, or the iPhone app? Tell us in the comments.