Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

They ruined it! Pre-acquisition Heardle played the song from the beginning immediately after you finished guessing. Post-acquisition, you had to open the song in Spotify which introduced a lag of several seconds. The immediate visceral reward of playing the game disappeared.

Spotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.

Just day before I saw Spotify had the same ADHD inducing reels/tiktok style music discovery thing on it. What is it with all these companies using the same UX patterns EVERYWHERE. As one commentor rightly said, Discover Weekly is the only thing keeping me on this platform, they even removed family mixes, my brothers and uncles are on my family plan, and even though we didn't keep in touch a lot that used to be a talking point whenever we met and was such a cool thing.

Does this mean the Heardle developers will be tasked elsewhere, like writing that AirPlay 2 integration they've had the ability to do for well over a year now, instead of a stupid widget for our iPhone lockscreens that doesn't even do what people want it to?

Never heard of it. Thought it sounded fun. Went to play it.<p>I had to skip without guessing to the end and then see today’s answer. I never heard that song in my life, nor ever heard of the artist. Connecting Heardle to my Spotify profile would make a more fun game.

Heardle was one of the games that we really enjoyed quite a bit, but definitely needed some sort of variation to the game itself other than &#x27;first x seconds&#x27;<p>Usually we would get the answer in a single try, because it happened to be a song we knew by heart, or we wouldn&#x27;t get it at all because we didn&#x27;t know the artist&#x2F;it was just not in a genre to which we regularly listen&#x2F;the song was an obscure hit or one hit wonder before our time<p>Perhaps it would have been better as &#x27;guess the artist&#x27; and give you 5 second clips from decreasingly obscure songs

Heardle was fun, but really needed more development. Why not use other parts of the song besides the intro? I think they also could broken it into genres or decades. I mostly lost interest because I&#x27;d go too many days with songs that I simply had no chance with. (I assume they are popular with the kids, but I&#x27;m out of touch)

What was their original plan when they purchased it?<p>Was it just an acquihire all along?

I wonder what happened to the people who decided to buy it? Was it bought with intention to integrate it or to close it?<p>I guess it is not worth to keep it on life suport with a skeleton crew just fixing bugs (if even needed)? But then why buy it in the first place?<p>Embrace and extinguish?

Seems reasonable.<p>It&#x27;s a product that should, and perhaps could in a more bullish market, have grown their subscriber base while adding value to their core product.<p>Clearly they didn&#x27;t get the numbers they wanted&#x2F;needed and if everyone else is cutting right now, this is something that seems reasonable to cut from their expenses.<p>The concept of the game sounds cool though as a customer of the company itself however I didn&#x27;t know about it.<p>Also I wouldn&#x27;t put it past them to push features of the game directly into the Spotify app in the future. (Maybe they already have, I don&#x27;t know).

Thank goodness. One of my Facebook friends spams my feed with his Heardle score every day and it drives me crazy.

Oh dear. Less than a year.<p>This is what happens when businesses follow and chase short-term hype cycles and end up wasting time and money in the end. The return on investment of this acquired startup is exactly $0.<p>Facebook on the other hand with the Instagram acquisition gave returns into the tens of billions of dollars.

Spotify has a document oriented culture. All they do all day is writing docs. No wonder they cannot execute on anything meaningful. It&#x27;s unfortunate because it&#x27;s a great employer.

I wanted to try it but it was never made available in Germany.

I remain pissed that Twitter killed Scroll within 6 months.

I enjoyed Heardle because I&#x27;d like to say I&#x27;m good at identifying a lot of the songs. Unfortunate buyout&#x2F;dump story.

This is the American dream in 2023. Get bought out and your product retired within the same year. Must be nice.

As long as heardle 80s stays up.

What an incredible journey. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a>)