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iOS 13's Music App Sucks

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Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#101

Post by danShumway »

Finnucane wrote: post #97
danShumway wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is pretty much impossible to build a music UX that optimizes for all three of these user types This is a good argument for not tying music subscriptions to a specific client -- ie, allowing 3rd-party clients that are optimized for my specific user-type to freely hook into and stream from my Google Play Music subscription via an official API. The Google Play Music client is not optimized for users like me. I'm su…

You could have different clients for different kinds of users. But then you would almost certainly have users complaining that they need more than one client to do what they want.

This would still (often) be strictly better than having those same users complain that there are no clients that do what they want.

It's also an easily solveable problem if the APIs are actually open. If Apple put out three music clients, you would definitely get people complaining that they weren't unified. If Apple shipped an open iOS API that covered everything in their official client(s), somebody in the community would just build one client that did everything a complaining demographic wanted, and then sell it for $4.99 on the app store.

When you see large groups of people complaining about current tech offerings for sustained periods of time, that usually means that the legal and/or technical barriers to entry to build alternatives are too high.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#102

Post by deerIRL »

nytesky wrote: post #96

We have used Apple Music for over a year, and it works great for our use case “I want to listen to song by such and such” — with kids you do a lot of repeat plays. Integration with Echo devices was a nice plus, but we had been gifted a Google Home which does not play Apple Music. People rave about Spotify, so we took the plunge. It did link with my Google Home and Echo devices. Everything else was disappointing. The…

The Muzak issue is what actually caused me to switch from Spotify to Apple Music.

My discovery playlists started replacing mainstream songs with muzak and there was no way at the time to block an artist or specific songs.

I can only listen to terrible chiptunes of In the hall of the Mountain King so many times.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#103

Post by coreai »

I have both Spotify and Apple Music but somehow the Spotify interface to me seems just simple enough that I can play what I want and the interface gets out of the way. With Apple it’s almost like they want you to listen to what they want you to listen and not what you want to listen to. This is what basically companies trying to push their content do over what content you prefer and it almost always ends up in bad interfaces.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#104

Post by chipotle_coyote »

danShumway wrote: post #92
Shebanator wrote: post #55

As someone who worked on Google Play Music for many years, I'd like to point out that a lot of the UX criticisms here are really just personal preferences, and those preferences are based in very large part on the way you listen to music. Some people are "lean back" listeners who just want to put on a radio station of music they like and not fiddle with it. Others are expert curators who have tens of thousands of tra…

> It is pretty much impossible to build a music UX that optimizes for all three of these user types This is a good argument for not tying music subscriptions to a specific client -- ie, allowing 3rd-party clients that are optimized for my specific user-type to freely hook into and stream from my Google Play Music subscription via an official API. The Google Play Music client is not optimized for users like me. I'm su…

There are third-party music players for iOS that hook into Apple Music -- Soor and Marvis, for instance -- and take different approaches to their UX. (Disclaimer: I haven't used them and can't speak to their particular advantages and disadvantages; while I don't love the iOS 13 music player, I can deal with it, and I routinely use features like "Radio" and "For You" that the original poster was complaining about.)

But, yeah, I'd definitely like to see more services offer full-featured APIs and actively support, if not necessarily promote, third-party clients. Watching what Twitter did to their ecosystem was supremely frustrating.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#105

Post by poulsbohemian »

dangus wrote: post #18
poulsbohemian wrote: post #6

He's completely right about Apple Music and it's been bad since long before iOS 13. The navigation is incredibly difficult to understand. I get very frustrated about why I have to both tell Apple I love something and put it in my library before their algorithms are smart enough to figure out that maybe I like that band / song and they should find related music. The Spotify discovery algorithms are better in every way…

That doesn’t make sense, the cash back could just be cash. It doesn’t make those services magically free.

Except there's a cycle - you get 3% back on Apple purchases. Notice I said "free" with air quotes - sure, you are spending money, but you are also being rewarded for staying in the Apple walled garden. So back to my point - why pay $9-$15/mo for Spotify when if you play the game, Apple has a "good enough" product and is incentivizing you monetarily to the point that their services become "included" rather than a separate line item in your monthly budget. Maybe it doesn't matter to you, but to a wide swath in middle America it does.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#106

Post by CharlesW »

okennedy wrote: post #69
oflannabhra wrote: post #8

I have an Apple Music subscription and use Apple Music (the app) daily. In this article, I hear a lot of "I". IMO, the big challenge with Apple Music is all the legacy that a) personal libraries, b) iTunes Match, and c) iTunes purchases all bring to the new streaming paradigm. Those are problems Apple has to solve, and can't just discard. Apple's customers have plowed tons of $$$ to "own" their libraries, and Apple i…

At the same time, the UX has gotten dramatically worse for people who do manage their own music libraries as well. The entire UI has been restructured around music discovery... which is appropriate for Apple Music, but really gets in the way when trying to find a specific album or track (e.g., I need to click through about three screens just to get to the album list, and there's no way to set the default). It's tryin…

> …really gets in the way when trying to find a specific album or track…

When I launch Apple Music, I just tap Search and can constrain it to my library with one touch. I feel like I can get to any album in a few seconds.

What you're doing isn't wrong, of course, but it doesn't seem like the designed-for path.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#107

Post by q_eng_anon »

Apple, Spotify, etc. (or a third-party) need to agree on a standard format for a users music library so that we can switch between UIs more easily - separate the UI from the actual music provider, allow more niche UIs

Obviously nobody will do this because their whole game is locking people in - but nothing is stopping Apple/Spotify from exposing a dev interface to Apple Music's UI components that would allow essentially the same thing but only with Apple Music as backend provider

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#108

Post by DHPersonal »

An alternative that I found pretty pleasant — but once I got an Apple Music subscription, a bit unnecessary — is an app called Cs Music by Mike Clay. He has a new app in pre-order status called SongOwl that might prove to be better than Cs Music, but I haven’t seen much of it. I bought Cs Music to get a landscape view music player again, but I’ve since just accepted that most people use portrait mode these days.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#109

Post by mattcantstop »

Rdio was amazing. I use Apple Music now (family plan) but I would pay probably $25/month to have Rdio back. Rdio had the best features for following other people who had similar interests to me and seeing what they were currently listening to. It was amazing. And it was an experience using Rdio. I would be in the app during my work day quite a lot seeing what music there was to discover. Music discovery was never better. I want Rdio back!

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#110

Post by tomc1985 »

oflannabhra wrote: post #8

I have an Apple Music subscription and use Apple Music (the app) daily. In this article, I hear a lot of "I". IMO, the big challenge with Apple Music is all the legacy that a) personal libraries, b) iTunes Match, and c) iTunes purchases all bring to the new streaming paradigm. Those are problems Apple has to solve, and can't just discard. Apple's customers have plowed tons of $$$ to "own" their libraries, and Apple i…

I don't understand how putting personal music libraries into a "downloaded music" ghetto ticks any more than the bare minimum requirement of 'bringing them along'.

My personal music collection should be front and center.

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