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Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective

michaelevensen.com

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Re: Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective

#11

Post by Matsta »

Unfortunately, most of the radio shows I listen to are hosted on Soundcloud, and I find the app is incredibly frustrating.

* If you stop a song and come back in a few minutes, it has forgotten and goes back to the start of the song. If you leave it for a few hours, it just restarts the app and goes to the homepage, and you have no way of figuring out what you were listening to.

* On accounts that update regularly, you have to refresh recent tracks manually every time, as it aggressively caches results which are usually weeks old.

* The player interface is too minimal. It puts so much emphasis on the track cover which is silly because it's a music app.

* The touch gestures are annoying and it's too easy to go accidently to the next track when you are seeking through a track

Seeing screenshots of the old app, it looks more like an upgrade of the current app.

Re: Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective

#12

Post by minikomi »

ruddct wrote: post #4

Ah, Soundcloud. One of the companies I should love the most given my usage of it, but hate with a strong passion due to their product and technical bungles. Let's take it from the top: Product (applicable to iOS and web): * Their mobile app and desktop products are, essentially, two completely different experiences. They have not evolved in sync with each other at all. * Listening to tracks I've saved is hidden deep,…

Agreed. Most frustrating app I use daily. Wish I could turn off reposts in. My stream. Wish I could sort and refine searches - is sort by upload date too much to ask? Wish I could at least see track information on the iOS app - super important especially for mix tracklists..

At this point I'd say essentially no-one feels loyalty to the soundcloud brand, and few trust the service to listen to its users (both content creators or consumers). A risky place to be as a consumer facing business.

Re: Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective

#13

Post by pducks32 »

I cannot stand to use SC's iOS app. The experience is slow in many respects. Usually when I find hidden features in a design (like I often do with Apple's design) I find that it enhances the experience, while with SC it just bugs me. Like when I accidentally slip the song because I swiped too much.

Re: Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective

#15

Post by cloudjacker »

ruddct wrote: post #4

Ah, Soundcloud. One of the companies I should love the most given my usage of it, but hate with a strong passion due to their product and technical bungles. Let's take it from the top: Product (applicable to iOS and web): * Their mobile app and desktop products are, essentially, two completely different experiences. They have not evolved in sync with each other at all. * Listening to tracks I've saved is hidden deep,…

I use the mobile app exclusively. I remember their old mobile app, a split ios and ipad experience, sometimes one version was not available on one device's iTunes Store at random times.

I like what is has become.... if you already know what artist you want to listen to.

- The push notification randomness is annoying, I've never responded to a push, except as a shortcut to open the app to get to the artist I wanted

- My most annoying gripe was that it forces you to sign up if you want to retain history (or follow an artist to at least have them in your feed)

- But after you sign up it is just as forgetful as ever, except if you follow an artist they'll be in your feed... somewhere....

Re: Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective

#18

Post by Matsta »

adrianpike wrote: post #5
ruddct wrote: post #4

Ah, Soundcloud. One of the companies I should love the most given my usage of it, but hate with a strong passion due to their product and technical bungles. Let's take it from the top: Product (applicable to iOS and web): * Their mobile app and desktop products are, essentially, two completely different experiences. They have not evolved in sync with each other at all. * Listening to tracks I've saved is hidden deep,…

Another fun one for me is when the web experience mysteriously pegs a CPU core. Seems to happen every couple days.

Happens to me as well, but only with Chrome. I Also have an issue when you go to another tab and come back and all the waveforms have disappeared.

Firefox and Safari don't seem to have these issues.

Re: Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective

#19

Post by chejazi »

I don't have any experience using the old app, but I previously used Soundcloud's web product. The main purpose was to listen to music made by more esoteric artists. For more mainstream stuff, I turned to YouTube. Obviously this setup was suited poorly for mobile.

Now I use the Soundcloud and Spotify apps for roughly the same respective purposes (Spotify replacing YouTube). I prefer the simplicity of the Soundcloud app over the feature-rich but complex Spotify app. There's plenty of data not displayed in the Soundcloud app that might be shown in the Spotify app, but good luck becoming consistent at finding that data.

Overall I'm happy they cleaned up the app and dropped the old webapp features.

Re: Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective

#20

Post by thirdsun »

ruddct wrote: post #4

Ah, Soundcloud. One of the companies I should love the most given my usage of it, but hate with a strong passion due to their product and technical bungles. Let's take it from the top: Product (applicable to iOS and web): * Their mobile app and desktop products are, essentially, two completely different experiences. They have not evolved in sync with each other at all. * Listening to tracks I've saved is hidden deep,…

Spot on. At this point Soundcloud's biggest advantage is the fact that it has every tastemaker / DJ on there - some time ago the same thing could be said about MySpace and bands / artists.

My use case for Soundcloud is mostly listening to sets, often featuring rare material, well done by crate diggers as well as keeping up with some smaller labels I enjoy. Frankly, these days I'd prefer to do that on Mixcloud, which isn't flawless but at least gets the basics right, like remembering my play queue and current position.

Sidenote: When speaking about Soundcloud's mobile app one has to mention the fact that there is a seperate app, Pulse, just to handle comments and notifications which seems insane to me. As a content creator I use it, but don't see how this couldn't be integrated into the already existing app which apparently is for consumption only.

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