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Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

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Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

#21

Post by edmundsauto »

CSSer wrote: post #9

I’m going to be glued to this thread because I desperately want this. If you ask me, a lack of features like this is the #1 failure of the Apple ecosystem. I’d even go so far as to call it a kind of big, indirect lie. Why own a ton of Apple devices if you can’t seamlessly and easily control things on whatever Apple device is nearest? For years I feel like I was told as long as I carefully and meticulously shelled out…

And it seems to be decomposing in front of us. I asked my Amazon device to play the Beatles from Spotify. The response was “I could not find a band called the Beatles”.

Of course, when I dropped the “from Spotify”, there was an app that only played the Beatles. With ads.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

#22

Post by a_bonobo »

CSSer wrote: post #9

I’m going to be glued to this thread because I desperately want this. If you ask me, a lack of features like this is the #1 failure of the Apple ecosystem. I’d even go so far as to call it a kind of big, indirect lie. Why own a ton of Apple devices if you can’t seamlessly and easily control things on whatever Apple device is nearest? For years I feel like I was told as long as I carefully and meticulously shelled out…

Cory Doctorow recently coined 'enshittification':

>When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.

He wrote it in the context of Twitter/Facebook, but it fits for other 'closed' ecosystems like the Apple ecosystem.

https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

#23

Post by plusminusplus »

baby wrote: post #16
purpleblue wrote: post #6

The Apple Music app is terrible, one of the worst on the market. I hate it, it is so clunky and borderline unusable.

The only thing I can say is that: 1. It has come a long way. iTunes really was a horrible piece of shit software for many years. It is much much much better now. 2. There isn't any viable alternatives. I don't care what people say, I've tried them all. IMO there's two bigger issues that really prevent anyone from competing and improving the status quo: a. You need to be friends with the music industry to be in this f…

It wasn't intended as a replacement for iTunes, it's a streaming service (iTunes was for music you wanted to own).

I think Apple Music turns 15 years old this year (released in iOS 1)...it hasn't come that far in all that time.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

#24

Post by oefrha »

mlindner wrote: post #17
baby wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I can say is that: 1. It has come a long way. iTunes really was a horrible piece of shit software for many years. It is much much much better now. 2. There isn't any viable alternatives. I don't care what people say, I've tried them all. IMO there's two bigger issues that really prevent anyone from competing and improving the status quo: a. You need to be friends with the music industry to be in this f…

> 1. It has come a long way. iTunes really was a horrible piece of shit software for many years. It is much much much better now. Speak for yourself. iTunes user interface was so much easier on the computer to use than the current mess that is the Music app on the computer. I'd love to get the old iTunes app back.

I loved the everything iTunes and never understood why people constantly complained about it. I knew exactly how I could get to anything.

Now, people got what they wished for: iTunes split into a million pieces, with every piece crappified in the process. Just yesterday Music automagically fetched some wrong album art for a track I added, and after adding the correct image, I couldn’t delete that wrong one for two minutes, until I suddenly could (I just kept pressing delete, god knows what was going on). Ugh.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

#25

Post by code_witch_sam »

CSSer wrote: post #9

I’m going to be glued to this thread because I desperately want this. If you ask me, a lack of features like this is the #1 failure of the Apple ecosystem. I’d even go so far as to call it a kind of big, indirect lie. Why own a ton of Apple devices if you can’t seamlessly and easily control things on whatever Apple device is nearest? For years I feel like I was told as long as I carefully and meticulously shelled out…

i opened the music app on my watch, clicked the airplay icon, and i see all of my home devices (homepod, apple tvs) listed. even my mac mini is listed.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

#27

Post by jsz0 »

I feel like at this point adding more continuity features would just be drawing attention to the fact they rarely work correctly and are poorly/confusingly implemented in a variety of ways. Maybe I have exceptionally bad results and they work fine for everyone else but my general sense is Apple quiet quits features they know are a dumpster fire.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

#28

Post by jonathanlydall »

It's not even just continuity between devices that it lacks, most times when I plug my iPhone into my car's USB port, it always starts playing the library at track 0 (alphabetically). Normally I could avoid this if I open the Music app before plugging it in, but it would not always work.

So one of my favourite things about Spotify is that this doesn't happen.

However, unless I have the Music app still installed on the iPhone, the car's entertainment system doesn't show what's playing with Spotify and most times when I plug it in it plays from the Music app instead of Spotify and I have to switch apps. So I installed the Music app again and sync'd a single "silent" track with an exclamation icon album art and a track title saying "Switch Apps".

It's really annoying that when I had to buy a new car in 2019 after my old one was written off, that Apple CarPlay wasn't available in Hondas in South Africa except in Civics and CRVs or better, even though in other countries it was. I'd been holding off buying a new car until CarPlay was available and been telling the sales reps as much each time I'd look while dropping my car off for a service.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

#29

Post by nightpool »

I have the same question about YouTube Music—it's actually at the point now where YouTube proper does handoff better then the music app does, but Spotify is still way ahead of any other company in this area, including seamless handoff and using your laptop/phone as a remote control for a desktop or a different phone. I think most people just don't have multiple devices tbh, so companies don't see it as worth it to invest in multiple device coordination features. I wonder what the Spotify usage stats are.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

#30

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

semireg wrote: post #13
nielsbot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which part? This isn't my experience at all...

Almost the entire thing. How about keyboards having an integrated pause play button but it only works for Apple Music if it’s the last responder in handling the event. On YouTube? Hijacked. Incoming phone call and you want to pause music? Nope, your Mac ANSWERS THE PHONE! I was finally fed up and installed a 3rd party app that forces pause play to only hit Apple Music. I use my MBP through a USB-C dock with an extern…

So, I think the pause/play button problem is almost unsolvable: I want the pause/play button to always pause whatever sound is currently playing and then resume it the next time I hit it. The issue is, though, I think doing this correctly in every situation becomes an exercise in telepathy.
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