Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective

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&#x27;s take it from the top:<p>Product (applicable to iOS and web):<p>* Their mobile app and desktop products are, essentially, two completely different experiences. They have not evolved in sync with each other at all.<p>* Listening to tracks I&#x27;ve saved is hidden deep, deep within the app.<p>* Social capabilities don&#x27;t exist in the app. Inexplicably, it&#x27;s most of what exists on the desktop product.<p>* Oh look, I got a notification on the app. Who knows what it&#x27;s about, though, no way to find out.<p>* What about something as simple as listening to a track and trying to figure out what time is? Nope. Their music player inexplicably hides the on-screen clock because some designer didn&#x27;t want it messing with album artwork.<p>* Every aspect of the web product screams &#x27;we just cloned every other social network out there all at once&#x27;. It&#x27;s a messy hodgepodge of features, 80% of which I don&#x27;t use.<p>Technical:<p>* This one is easier to explain. The web and mobile products are constantly, incredibly buggy. Music stops every 10 minutes or so, randomly. The app crashes. Display errors abound. It&#x27;s a mess.<p>A shame because the &#x27;magic moment&#x27; in Soundcloud is, truly, incredible. Make connections with artists and tastemakers you like. See their music and interact with moments of it with other fans. I&#x27;m frustrated because I truly believe it could be great. Unfortunately, their product and technical teams have not kept up.

Unfortunately, most of the radio shows I listen to are hosted on Soundcloud, and I find the app is incredibly frustrating.<p>* 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.<p>* On accounts that update regularly, you have to refresh recent tracks manually every time, as it aggressively caches results which are usually weeks old.<p>* The player interface is too minimal. It puts so much emphasis on the track cover which is silly because it&#x27;s a music app.<p>* The touch gestures are annoying and it&#x27;s too easy to go accidently to the next track when you are seeking through a track<p>Seeing screenshots of the old app, it looks more like an upgrade of the current app.

I&#x27;m a PM at SoundCloud and want to let everyone know that this post is very, very old. I believe over 2 years. Difficult to tell from the site though.<p>That said, the feedback here in this thread is good feedback, so I do appreciate everyone taking the time to write it. Much of will be resolved soon, so keep on the lookout for future updates.<p>Let me know if you have any specific questions or input.

As someone who got into Soundcloud after the new app was released, I&#x27;ve gotta say the old app looks great... I wish I could use that! The new one is so limited.

The iOS app is one of the current instances of form over function. It&#x27;s far too minimal. I use the web app and mobile app everyday, I much prefer the web app.

I cannot stand to use SC&#x27;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&#x27;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.

As a novice developer, I find it tremendously helpful reading about thought processes and real-life development of apps. Does anyone know any more case studies like this one? Perhaps, something more technical, too?

I&#x27;m a dj in my part time and I feel that this app should be one of my most used - it&#x27;s not though. The timeline always is irrelevant, the app crashes, the caching of music is annoying (I often drop network connectivity on the commute to work and the app will freeze, forget where I&#x27;m at or drop out like seconds in to the lack of network connectivity - despite having a good connection for the last 5 minutes.)<p>I can&#x27;t see who liked or shared my mixes or tracks. Comments are impossible.<p>And the search annoys me. I&#x27;ll search for a friend as the timeline is so poor and the auto complete must go on popularity and not even consider my friends...<p>I could go on but I feel that many of the points have been mentioned before...

I don&#x27;t have any experience using the old app, but I previously used Soundcloud&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Overall I&#x27;m happy they cleaned up the app and dropped the old webapp features.

I hate it...they removed the information tab and made it ridiculously hard to stay on the same &quot;vein&quot; of content you were listening to without going bak to the home page.

yeh never understand why they cannot link desktop and mobile, not a mention of the bridge pattern? is it hard or do you not like the desktop people? not a mention of why is really daft. totally weird of them that ios has completely different data it seems.

Great write up. Any news on Chromecast support in the iOS app? Android app has had it for a while.