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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface In most big web services, actual functionality in the API normally seems to leads to its eventual deprecation. Will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
IIRC, the API is for paying users only.
I f'ing hate spotify with a passion. The shit UX and them pushing JRE and other bullshit podcasts I dont want or need in my life was bad, but for me the final straw was that they decided to show me popups for their shit playlists when I was trying to put on one some music. Found out they have been doing it for years to people, and if you complain they basically refer you to the suggestion box and to go f yourself. I…
Wait, what java runtime has to do with spotify?
I've got tired of this stuff so I just went back to downloading music. It has friction but in the end it's much better to have my music in my regular music player.
It really hampers discoverability, though. I've used Youtube Music for quite a while now, and I discovered a lot of songs that I really like. (And way more that I didn't.) Without a service pushing those other songs on me (and not listening to the radio with all its commercials!) I'm not sure how I'd find new songs, especially ones that came out years ago and I just never heard them. This might even include genres th…
I feel like i look like a neoludite but honestly, it's just better.
I f'ing hate spotify with a passion. The shit UX and them pushing JRE and other bullshit podcasts I dont want or need in my life was bad, but for me the final straw was that they decided to show me popups for their shit playlists when I was trying to put on one some music. Found out they have been doing it for years to people, and if you complain they basically refer you to the suggestion box and to go f yourself. I…
>> So I switched back to Apple music. It's pretty shit, but at least I get to decide what I want to listen too. I love and hate Apple Music. The library style interface is great. But for a company that hangs on about the virtue of native apps the Music app is complete dogshit. Even with the recent slightly more native “rewrite” I still spend ages waiting for screens to load. Spotify is so much snappier.
When talking about the downside of Spotify, everyone focuses on the lack of control over the catalog. This is a real issue, with tracks sometimes just disappearing, but another loss of control is in the interface. Local audio files for me, please.
Netflix and Amazon are terrible. Want to continue what you were watching? Gonna have to find where we hid that this time, g’luck!
It's why I'm being driven back to piracy, because the UI/UX is do horrible on these platforms, that and believe it or not because Content discovery is easier a couple of the piracy apps look at what I have in my collection, and do recommendations off that... And guess what.. it's really good. So a bunch of people in their spare time seem to be doing a better job than Netflix, why is that? Because I don't think Netfli…
> If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Nowadays I exclusively pirate movies and shows, because just the thought of having to spend 30 minutes to figure out where some movie is, then trying to navigate the respective service's interface, just to be presented with a not-empty-but-actually-doesnt-show-what-i-was-searching-for-because-stats-said-people-might-watch-more-if-you-mislead-them-in-search-results-pages because it is not available on my region, and then trying to figure out what combination of VPN and region incantations won't block me behind a million captchas, is too much work to be bothered with.
Instead, I just open Stremio, put in the movie or show name, and even if it is some obscure Javanese arthouse film from the '20s (I don't know if such a thing exists, but you get the point) it will find it. Sure, finding a source with good availability is sometimes not the first-click experience, but it's still at least 10 times faster than all the above. And I can put on screen sharing to watch it with my friends without DRM blacking out the screen.
Worst of all, the pricing structures of streaming apps are very opaque, so if I were to do the still-illegal-but-morally-correct thing of paying for the official product and pirating anyways, I don't think any of my subscription fee would actually go to the company that made that film.
I wish we had a functioning rental model still. Go to some storefront, pay a small amount of money to get any publisher's title, get a video file to play "at home" (in your preferred video player), pinky swear you didn't rip it, done. The closest you get is the Youtube rental thingy, but at least over here it is incredibly overpriced, costs more than a cinema ticket. Or buying physical media, but then you have to pay the physical distribution costs, keep around shiny plastic donuts and specialized machinery.
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And besides, I'm still not sold on algorithmic recommendations, and watch things mostly based on meatspace recommendations.
Subscription services have one simple goal: provide just enough value to keep one from cancelling their subscription. There is no real incentive to do better if all the competitors have the same goal and behaviour, which is the current situation. So they raise the prices a little bit, skip on user-motivated UX, and double down on mediocre "just good enough to idly waste time on" content, and slowly bring down the user expectations about content and how to find it, placing them in a "learned helplessness" state of not being arsed to find what they like themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I switched to Tidal when I learned about Spotify’s data sharing and privacy concerns a little over a year ago, but I was also so frustrated with Spotify’s UI always changing in frustrating ways and making it worse. They’d break features that I used often (playlist sorting broke, for example). I’d contact customer support and they’d go through this whole “uninstall and reinstall the app, does it still happen?” …Y…
Is Tidal's UI lightweight(like it's not Electron)? What about the songs? Are you satisfied with the songs library? I'm thinking about switching since native spotify app's playing gif (or icon) spikes my CPU usage for some very strange reason.
Back in the day I use Rdio, which had a pretty good UI; unfortunately they shut down.
I don't know if others saw the same behavior. I'm on Android. And I feel like I'm in some sort of a big A/B test regarding their app. One day, the interface changes one way, couple days later it changes back. Constantly some menu or behavior changes. It's super frustrating. Lately it seems to have stabilized, but it really made me feel like a guinea pig. And maybe that's my inner old person speaking, but most of the…
I've switched to Deezer which I find saner, but I fear these streaming companies just aren't incentivised to produce simple interfaces.