Spotify's UK MD Chris Maples has told Pocket-lint that the Spotify apps launch was just the first of a long line of announcements that the music streaming company has got planned and that the long awaited native iPad app isn't too far away.

Describing the apps launch as "the biggest announcement that we've ever made" Maples stated that the launch of an iPad app was "a priority" and was "absolutely in the pipeline".

Spotify has since contacted us to state: "Our goal is to have Spotify available on every device possible and we’re working on new apps all the time."

The UK Spotify boss also made it clear that the streaming giant's relentless assault across multiple platforms was set to continue.

"At the moment we're absolutely not a manufacturing business but if consumers demand something cool that we should create ourselves and we think we could do it better than anyone else, who knows?" he said.

Could Spotify therefore be following Amazon down the hardware path by producing its own devices to playback the content that it's licensed for?

"We launched recently on Virgin Media's TiVo platform and our fundamental philosophy is anytime, anywhere. Consumers make no differentiation between devices and we want our service to be available on any device that people want it on."

In terms of the launch in question, Maples was keen to stress that, despite being an open platform, Spotify's app offerings will not go down the Android route with thousands of clone apps turning up and not really boosting the ecosystem.

"We've launched with services that are naturally intuitive to our business and work seamlessly hand in hand, he said.

"We've started lots of conversations with a lot of people and these were the ones that we thought were best for launch. We need to see how consumers react, see what they like and then slowly we'll release more and more.

"We realised pretty early on that being an open platform was the only way to go about this. We realise that we can't provide everything ourselves and there's a lot of great minds out there to create great stuff.

"We operate a really clean, smooth service and we want that to continue. We will, therefore, have high quality thresholds. We'll be pretty rigorous in making sure that when apps launch, that they will be adding value to our service."

The apps, of which there are no plans to start charging for at present, will remain with the Spotify desktop client for the time being with no plans to allow developers to embed Spotify in their own software or on to websites. However, Maples did confirm that the apps will be spreading across the Spotify portfolio and will eventually appear on the iPhone and Android apps.

You can try out the new Spotify apps by downloading the beta software now.

Also, check out our Spotify with apps pictures and hands-on