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iOS 13's Music App Sucks

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Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#171

Post by swasheck »

lbotos wrote: post #70
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…

Can we all agree that the "now playing" screen is objectively worse. I had to google how to set repeat and shuffle. (You have to "scroll up" from the bottom. Not swipe, but a scroll like motion. I studied Human Computer Interaction and interfaces in college . It's hidden and unintuitive for no good reason.

I’m a Google Play customer who is trying out Apple Music right now. There are many things I love. Obviously the seamless interaction with other Apple properties (e.g. CarKit) is great. I prefer the feedback that lets me know about the status of my song downloads, over against Google’s. I like Apple’s library and something about the way the base experience works feels more natural to me.

This is my biggest complaint. How in the world do I get off of the lyrics display and then how do I shuffle and repeat?

Also, if I want more by an artist than what I have in my library, I get to the artist and then look at the library and then have to swipe up once or twice in order to get the “show more by this artist” option. Minor annoyance and I’ve learned the pattern, it just took a bit.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#172

Post by mopsi »

jvreeland wrote: post #99
andrewzah wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I find the Overcast app to be quite nice. I've been using that for 2+ years with few complaints.

I really don't like overcast : ( I've tried to switch several times, especially since the podcast redesign and I just can't.

Give Pocket Casts a try: https://www.pocketcasts.com/

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#173

Post by jedberg »

I've seen a couple of rants about Apple software here on HN the last few days. It's important to remember that Apple has never been very good at software services.

Sometimes they make something good, but usually they make "just ok".

Because they never had to be good. Their hardware was compelling enough that people just suffered through their software because they had to.

But now they're trying to make money from their software services. They're probably fooled into thinking they are doing a good job because their revenue is so high and their customer base is so large, especially compared to their competitors.

But I think that's a red herring for them. They are still benefiting from their installed hardware base. I doubt they would have even half the customer base they do if they were just selling software (like say on Windows).

If they really want to make software services a key pillar of their business, they need to step up their game. They need to interview customers and listen to their needs. They need to collect analytics on usage and then actually analyze them to improve their products.

I think if they would spend a bit more resources on their software, and give their engineers a bit more leeway to experiment and actually talk to customers, they would be far more successful than they already are.

I think their culture of secrecy is hurting them in the software space, and always has.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#174

Post by danShumway »

azinman2 wrote: post #128
danShumway wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communit…

Apple does have a public API for Apple Music [1], as does Spotify [2]. In fact, I frequently use a 3rd party client [3] that's all about curated music leveraging the Spotify API to stream the tracks. [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi [2] https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/ [3] https://noonpacific.com

I can't speak to Apple (I'm on Android), but I did look into 3rd-party clients for Spotify at one point and my impression was that the web API only allowed you to get information about songs, and remote-control the official client. The advice I saw online was LibSpotify was basically dead and that Spotify was probably going the same direction as Twitter: more locked down, more onerous developer TOS, fewer capabilities.

I'd be pretty happy to be wrong about that, since I'm fairly annoyed with Google Play. At the time, if I had found good enough API support and a good enough 3rd-party client, I would have switched services.

It's been a while since I looked into it, and maybe I missed something when I first did. I can see that Spotify is experimenting with a web playback API now[0], but as far as I can see it's still pretty limited.

[0]: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk...

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#175

Post by jvreeland »

kristofferR wrote: post #140
jvreeland wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't like overcast : ( I've tried to switch several times, especially since the podcast redesign and I just can't.

Yeah, Overcast is extremely weirdly designed in some places - the "Unplayed" tab contains played content for example.

Yeah basically the same stuff i dislike about the 'Listen now' and other weird modes.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#176

Post by Hamuko »

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…

>all the legacy that a) personal libraries

Since when did a personal library become legacy?

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#177

Post by gargs »

The one thing I wish they improved was being able to scroll through my playlists using an index on the right (like in the Contacts app). Right now, there are limited sorting options but all of them require considerable scrolling. Also, the cells are huge for some reason.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#178

Post by ProfessorLayton »

The Music.app has been one of my biggest pain points in all of iOS. Apple has always been opinionated about their software designs, but I can’t seem to make sense of the stance taken when they made the music player.

Is it music discovery? If so, why is the For You tab 2/3 recently played and favorites?? — I’ve obviously already discovered and liked that music! All the other stuff is below the fold or multiple swipes away.

The fact that all the other tabs are lazy-loaded drives me nuts. Just a completely blank page with a spinner, so I cant even scroll down to where I know I want to navigate until it loads (Super fun on the train with cellular dead zones).

More fun bugs:

- Add next: https://imgur.com/mIOn4I7

- Literally failing at music playback: https://imgur.com/4jCszaz

- Broken layout on smaller phones: https://imgur.com/MVTN1nS

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#179

Post by danShumway »

Finnucane wrote: post #165
danShumway wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communit…

And then people would complain that there were 1200 apps in the app store that did the same thing, and most of them badly.

And those people can just be safely ignored. I get that people get annoyed at needing to sift through a lot of options, but the way to solve that is by having more curated lists, rankings, and recommendations.

I am almost entirely unsympathetic to people who argue that having too much choice is a bad thing on an app store. That's not a real problem.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#180

Post by DavideNL »

Xavdidtheshadow wrote: post #78
DavideNL wrote: post #42

I have both Apple Music and Spotify, and i also dislike Apple's Music app; First, it deleted ALL my playlists on a random day for no apparent reason, and i couldn't restore them from backups because apparently the playlists are stored in the cloud or whatever and not in a local file. Also, after converting my personal library to "iCloud", Apple replaced all my specific versions of songs with crappy alternative versio…

Spotify has better discovery and recommendations, that's for sure. The killer feature for me is that Apple Music makes it seamless to add local mp3s into my library (accessible from anywhere). Spotify has this functionality, but you have to sync your phone on the same network as your computer and leave the app(s) open and go through a whole song-and-dance. On AM, I just click "Add to iCloud" in iTunes and suddenly th…

> The killer feature for me is that Apple Music makes it seamless to add local mp3s into my library

Yea i agree, that's the only reason i still use Apple Music next to Spotify, since some albums are not available in Spotify.

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