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Spotify Apps Suck

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Spotify Apps Suck

#21

Post by perryizgr8 »

Android app: It works fine on my S10. It can glitch out sometimes, but that is rare. I admit I almost never use the offline functions. So maybe that part of the app is not well-made.

Web app: I don't use the web app.

Mac/Windows app: I use these and they work flawlessly for me. Maybe you can try this instead of the web player. Web apps are often trash, so I won't be surprised if Spotify's was too.

Re: Spotify Apps Suck

#22

Post by vvillena »

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #11

Spotify a year or so ago added a button to "hide a song" if you don't like it. I think this is a good feature, but they put it right where the add to playlist button was at the top of options for a song. This Is So Stupid Why would you put a less used button so far up the options list? Why would you put it right where my most used button is? This was the worst UI decision I've ever seen and I hope there is a dev on t…

Reminds me of Google Meet: https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui.html

It probably looks great in a picture, but it's indeed a UX nightmare.

Re: Spotify Apps Suck

#23

Post by sor1nmarkov »

leoedin wrote: post #5

Spotify made much of their work model - completely autonomous teams working on whatever they thought was most important. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the reasons their app sucks is because of that. User interfaces don't really work when designed by committees.

Most of their effort now seems to be driven by saving them money, hence the big podcast push. Every time you listen to a podcast instead of music costs them less money so their profit from you goes up.

Re: Spotify Apps Suck

#24

Post by vvillena »

muzani wrote: post #3
kuya11 wrote: post #2

I once listened, partially, to a single “Learn Japanese” podcast. Now months later my Spotify homepage still recommends Japanese language learning podcasts every single day. I’m currently checking out YouTube Music. The deal is quite good, since it comes with YouTube Premium. In my experience the algorithm feels better, and you tend not to wind up on less “meh” recommendations.

I originally registered Spotify because of the recommendations, but it feels like YouTube is just much more spot on. Maybe it's time to switch.

I don't know about Youtube Music, but Google Play Music had no problems in deleting entries from your own playlists when a song wasn't available anymore. It's a form of musical gaslighting which I find entirely unacceptable. We have emotional ties to some music, so editing my own handmade playlists without my consent, and leaving no trace of the activity feels like a violation. That single behavior has stopped me from trusting Google with anything ever again.

Spotify leaves the songs there even if they are unplayable, but my playlists are still there.

Re: Spotify Apps Suck

#25

Post by agronomov »

What about UX though? Why on earth I cannot view all songs from one artist on mobile or web app (only desktop). I can only view all albums, so I should google which album the given song belongs to? I can search of course, but what if I don't remember the name exactly and will remember when I see it? What kind of PM or designer would think it's a great idea is beyond me. This is just one example, the app as a whole is almost as unintuitive as it can get compared to e.g. google music that was killed. It took me a while to discover how to view other songs for an artist, for example, and I doubt I'm alone here.

Re: Spotify Apps Suck

#26

Post by lstamour »

noahtallen wrote: post #13

Honestly, the two Spotify apps I regularly use (macOS and iOS) are some of the best apps I use. I’ve had small problems on the Windows app. But overall I find the Spotify experience fantastic. I have several thousand songs downloaded, and that works fine as long as I can keep the iOS from putting the app to sleep during a download. In terms of alternatives, the Apple Music iOS app is pretty bad in terms of performanc…

If you find Spotify and Apple buggy, just wait until you try Amazon Music, Tidal or YT Music. It can be hard to start streams against Alexa devices, figure out what’s playing, move it from speaker to speaker, download tracks, keep listening to something you started playing but then it just decided not to continue playing, and so on… Mac apps behave badly, don’t focus when you alt-tab, don’t always use the right speaker output, don’t automatically set output bitrate for HD tracks (you had one job, Amazon!)

Spotify may have problems, and I subscribe to all but Tidal at this point, but Spotify’s app is not a reason to stop using Spotify unless you really like giant album art, maybe. Or 24-bit FLAC. Spotify’s streaming quality is second worst, the only one worse than Spotify is YouTube on a random video rather than an officially uploaded song…

Re: Spotify Apps Suck

#28

Post by jamil7 »

savolai wrote: post #8

For me, playback of new songs often just doesn't happen on iOS. The app doesn't start playing the song at all. I need to like the song which I think makes the song available offline. This usually helps.

My main gripe with the iOS app is how they handle offline playback and support. There are two really distinct offline/online modes in the app and you will often have to explicitly switch your phone to airplane mode in order to kick it into it's offline mode and get access to your downloaded music. If you don't do this and happen to go through some patchy network area (like for instance the stairwell in my building) it will continuously try to load album artwork etc. and block rending of the rest of the UI so you can't even hit play on audio you've already cached/downloaded for offline use.

Re: Spotify Apps Suck

#29

Post by varispeed »

I think the biggest problem about Spotify is that they don't pay artists fairly. The money mostly go to big artists and independents get scraps. When they "fix" this problem, I might start using their apps, otherwise I feel it is unethical.
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