I think it is for the following reason:
They don't have a concept yet. Spotify Continuity, or however it is called, is wonderful for 3 devices and less. But add more devices and it will get frustrating. What if I want to listen to multiple song on different devices (family setups)? Spotify makes it awful, actually this is one of the main reason I left Spotify. Whenever I left the living room and wanted to play my music on my Mac, the lining room would stop and the people in the living room had to start the music from one of their accounts. This is awful and annoying. Sure, as a single, this wouldn't bother. But most people are not single. So, I think it is due to a missing concept. The HomePod transfer feature was supposed to close the gab a little, but this needs more work. So maybe in the future a switch stream to device button will come, but until then, I will ask Siri to do it for me, Siri transfer to [room name]. Just wish this would work on my iPhone, iPad and Mac as well.
Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
51–60 of 60 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
#52It'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 th…
This is actually a problem with your car. Some cars will issue a play audio command immediately upon connection. If no songs are in your iPhone's music queue, it will dutifully start from the top. Most newer cars won't do this, and you may be able to shut it off in your car's settings somewhere.
Except that if I open the Music app prior to plugging it in, then I almost always don't have this problem. The issue tends to occur only when iOS has closed the Music app at some point to free up resources.
It seems like my car instantly presses "Play" when plugged in, if the Music app was already loaded, then it continues where it left off, but if the Music app wasn't loaded, then iOS loads the music app but instead of making the iPod interface wait until it's loaded where I left off, it instead plays the default list of everything in your library alphabetically. It feels like a kind of race condition which was just never considered by Apple.
Then consider the problems with Spotify. If it was recently playing and I plug it in, then the radio uses Spotify, otherwise it uses the Music app and I need to switch to Spotify on the phone. If the Music app is uninstalled completely, then the iPod interface doesn't work properly, it doesn't show track names or the artwork. It seems highly unlikely to me that Spotify is using the wrong iOS APIs, so I expect the blame here also most lies with Apple.
I acknowledge that other cars may not have this problem, but I can't see why Apple couldn't make their software more robust here. Anyway, this is also why I stated my annoyance at the not having the option of CarPlay since it delegates more control to my iPhone, meaning I get innovation and bug fixes on the screen my car on Apple's timelines as opposed to "when I get a new car", and even then, the car companies have far fewer software development resources so can't possibly hope to keep up with the likes of Apple.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 li…
I mean, that's just vendor lock-in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in
Well it's a consequence of lock-in, not lock-in itself.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
#54Is iTunes completely dead now? I remember when that switched, I had a ton of music but made the early investment to never touch the new Music app because the icon color sucked. I'm guessing internally a project called "Music" attracts little talent and apple considers it a good place for new employees to grow, yielding mediocre results. To this day I use Vox for music I care about and SiriusXM in the car (avoiding the phone entirely) for music I don't care about.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
#55Earlier 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…
Isn't the play button issue solved by the Touch Bar? (I don't know because I don't use Apple Music yet), but I'd assume so since:
I just started playing a Youtube video and a Spotify song, then clicked on the audio button in the Touch Bar and it looks like this, double clicking the icon opens the appropriate app (opened that through the Control Strip, enabled in the Keyboard settings): https://ibb.co/6Pr1V6x
Though I guess the point is moot since the Touch Bar seems to be being phased out, and also due to the existence of 3rd party apps...
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Isn't the play button issue solved by the Touch Bar? (I don't know because I don't use Apple Music yet), but I'd assume so since: I just started playing a Youtube video and a Spotify song, then clicked on the audio button in the Touch Bar and it looks like this, double clicking the icon opens the appropriate app (opened that through the Control Strip, enabled in the Keyboard settings): https://ibb.co/6Pr1V6x Though I…
The joke is that the only thing solved by the Touch Bar was satisfying product designer egos.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
#57I’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 agree 100% but, if you wanted to change ecosystem as whole (not just for music), what alternatives are there, really? They clearly get away with this because whatever you'd change it with you'd be far worse off.
Sonos and Spotify both do more to make this possible than Apple is doing. I don't have to leave Apple to take advantage of these, but I don't have to stay or continue to buy their devices either. Overall, my confidence in the brand is just greatly reduced enough to seek out and evaluate alternatives next time I go looking for a device solution when previously my faith was high enough to not look beyond Apple. Heck, I could hack something together myself and get something more integrated.
You can look at it as others catching up or Apple slowing down, but the bottom line is that Apple isn't ahead of the pack anymore on this. I think they've focused so much on supply chain logistics and hardware that they've completely lost sight of the core day-to-day software user experience that originally created that die-hard Apple loyalty.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
#58I’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.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't. The only thing I see listed on my Apple Watch is my Airpods. I have an Apple Watch series 6 (cellular model), iPhone 14 Pro Max, three HomePod Minis, an Apple TV 4K, and an M1 MacBook Pro. All of these devices are listed under my Apple ID within macOS system settings, so I don't know what gives. I guess to Apple's credit, there are a lot of failure points that could exist beyond their control around WiFi connectivity. But the three devices I listed that can serve as Home Hubs should help alleviate this issue when, for example, my Apple Watch isn't connected to WiFi. Maybe I should dig into this more.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
#59Earlier 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…
I think Spotify does things a lot better and they fought the music industry a lot. These days everyone does it. They also do multi device so much better. It take feels "Apple". If I'm playing music on my phone I can actually change the song on a third party client on my FreeBSD desktop which isn't supported by Spotify at all. Spotify really does a lot of those things "you just can't do" and they aren't even big frien…
Last time I checked I couldn't upload all my MP3 libraries and then download it back easily, and I think I had some problem finding some Asian songs as well.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or because their competition is so far behind that what little Apple has in terms of integration is still miles ahead.
I haven't tried it for myself, but many comments here say that Spotify works far better, across many different devices and even with 3rd-party client software.
Then Spotify has committed crimes against the Walled Garden.