The library tree view is so terrible.<p>- You cannot shift+click select to easily add playlists into a folder.<p>- Any podcasts you follow cannot be moved into folders to tidy things up. They just clutter the sidebar.<p>- You have to click on a tiny arrow to expand a folder. Clicking on the folder navigates inside the folder.<p>The fact that podcasts are in the same Spotify mega-app is terrible too. And the podcast experience is a complete mess.<p>I listened to an interview with the head of Spotify product, and he talked about how great it was to have everything in this mega app. I just feel the opposite of everything he said.<p>It's one of the most popular services in the world, but has one of the worst user experiences of all the apps I use.<p>And they actually think they are doing a good job at it.
<i>It's one of the most popular services in the world, but has one of the worst user experiences of all the apps I use.</i><p>This is really common. It's a sign that the value isn't derived from the software itself, but what the software enables you to do. It doesn't <i>need</i> to be good. People pay to access Spotify's library of music and podcasts, <i>despite</i> the UI.<p>When you run a startup having people hungry to use your MVP despite it's flaws is a classic signal that you're on to something valuable. I could list hundreds of shockingly bad apps that have <i>awful</i> user experiences that I've happily used over the last 40 years because they all did something I really wanted or needed to do. Almost every 'enterprise' app is a total mess from a UI perspective - but they make a fortune because the value that users get from them make it worth putting up with.<p>People think a beautiful UI is something that every app needs, but really every app just needs to do something useful. None of them need a good UI until there's a competitor with an equivalent service that has a better UI. Only then does the UI actually matter, because it becomes something users will use to choose which service they buy.
I actually like the Spotify app.<p>For things I am (and maybe most normal users?) interested in, it works really nice: choose a song, listen to it, listen to the bands other songs, listen to their "radio" with similar songs, find new interesting bands, repeat.
I recently moved from Apple Music to Spotify to see what all the fuss is about, thinking it might get me listening to more music, or different stuff than Apple keeps playing. Using it feels like work and I don’t really get the how they expect users to use the app. I’m tempted to go see if there is a video from the designers explaining their vision so I can use it right. As of now it seems like a mess.<p>Also, their AI DJ makes no sense. The worst part about radio is the DJ saying nonsense between songs, and they added AI to say nonsense between songs. I was just looking for a way for it to play songs I’d probably like based on other songs/artists I like. With Apple I’d simply tell Siri, “play good music” and it would play a radio station with my name on it (without an interrupting fake DJ).
I moved to Apple Music because of the terrible state of the Spotify UI. I hated having podcasts and more recently audio books taking up real estate and generally just started to find it too difficult to navigate.<p>Apple Music isn’t perfect, but it has a more focused UI that makes it easier to find music.
They used to have simpler UI which supported default key bindings etc but then kept forcing redesigns which made the UI worse and removed things like ^F search. I switched to Apple Music few iterations ago. It's not as good as the old Spotify UI but still leagues ahead the current one.<p>I wish Spotify/Deezer/Apple had an SDK like libspotify used to be so that one could just write a simpler & faster client.
It's all about financial performance now more than ever. Crappy electron and whatnot apps that takes GBs of your disk and RAM, firing good people, implementing AI for every shit, just for a manager to have a better quarter and get his bonus, you’re the last of their priorities as long as you’re hooked and pay. Personally, I’m using what gets me a free month or so when possible, and from time to time I pay for Apple Music because of their Lossless and Classical on iOS. For home I’ve built an audio station with a Raspberry Pi 4 and Moode Audio and listen to Radios mostly.
For those unaware, it's possible to use alternative clients for Spotify using a 3rd party daemon.<p><a href="https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd">https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd</a>
Podcast is one of two the reasons I've unsubscribed Spotify (as you describe, the UX is terrible).<p>The other one, I was not able to "teach" the algorithm what I like even after 3 months.
you/we are not the target audience. most people love the auto play features and just want a selection of playlists or radios to put on. this is the majority audience that Spotify makes the most of its money from.
(Android) It also gets easily confused with Wifi and whether or not I'm online (because I'm in a room with bad wifi reception). It sometimes blocks on playing downloaded content when there is no internet (when listening in bed and internet is turned off). This has not changed in the last ten years. Not sure why they have thousands of programmers, and tribes and squads and who knows what else.<p>It's barely usable for radio plays (favorites, queue, last played, ...) as it does act on songs not albums in general.
The android app has been awful for years now.
Don't even think of using it if you have a bad connection, even the context menus have an animated loading circle thing.<p>I'm now actually trying out other services, the official youtube music app won't even launch since I don't have google play services.
But there's a lot of free/open-source clients too so I'm currently going through these.
Can anyone suggest a minimalist music streaming platform? I'm looking for a digital substitute for collecting CDs, something similar to the old iTunes. Maybe Apple Music is the right choice, or are there other options available?
+1 to Spicetify, it completely changed how I use the Spotify app on desktop:
<a href="https://spicetify.app/" rel="nofollow">https://spicetify.app/</a>
Fwiw, the YouTube music android app is pretty bad too. I generally need to force stop it a couple of times pr listening session because it freezes up getting the next track.<p>Also find it curious that there's apparently no Bluetooth hot key to "like" the current song, only single click for play/pause and double for skip. Bit maybe that's a Bluetooth headphone protocol thing?
Do you think that this might have something to do with it? <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/12/04/1216950219/spotify-layoffs-17-percent-tech" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2023/12/04/1216950219/spotify-layoffs-17...</a>
The iOS app feels much buggier in the past few weeks. Lockups when returning to the app, phantom pausing, and worst of all, clicking the podcast I’ve been listening to doesn’t take me to the right episode… I have to scroll to find it.<p>Not great when you’re trying to listen to a 700 episode series!
I was recently in hospital with not-so-great WiFi.<p>With the mobile app, I would often notice Spotify loading album artwork, lyris, artist information and even video before playing the music. It's network prioritisation is deeply disconnected from the users wants.<p>I remember when Spotify heavily optimised to play music in the quickest possible time. Enshittification indeed.
There's spicetify, which you can use to remove podcasts from and customize the UI of the desktop client:<p><a href="https://github.com/spicetify/spicetify-cli">https://github.com/spicetify/spicetify-cli</a>
For me the big signal is when there are tons of years-old quality of life feature requests that are unaddressed, like blocking podcasts from your podcast feed (listen to one startup podcast and it'll constantly put more of those automatically playing), or even a less awful high contrast dark mode (or even a light mode).<p>My biggest bugbear is how the web app is just as atrocious. If you leave it open too long without playing something, it just won't play the next song you select (just keeps loading forever) until you reload the page. That and the general latency in UI responsiveness (Is this a server issue because I'm in Africa?)<p>For a company with so many engineers, designers, etc, they really miss enough low hanging fruit that they turn into papercuts. All of what I've mentioned have been issues for years.<p>All that being said, I haven't moved off. I still like the Discover Weekly list and the algo is pretty well tuned to my likes so I can't be bothered to train YT Music/Apple Music/whatever to find me new stuff.
I'm semi-convinced it's the bad feedback loop of analytics => product team.<p>"I'm totally lost in this shitty UI, I have no idea how it's supposed to work" looks very much like "I love this interface, I could spend hours just looking at it" if all you have is analytics data.
For me the Android mobile app is sometimes skipping songs or not switching to the next one when swiping or tapping the next icon. Often recognizing another device as playing doesn't work. If it recognizes it then editing the song queue doesn't work more often than not (especially removing songs from the queue). I hate it. It is so bad, I'd be ashamed having so many users, so much money but such an bad app.
Enshittification - it's the most powerful force in software development.<p>When you have investors pushing money to spend, project managers that have to show <i>something</i>, and hordes of developers under your employ, even the best software experiences will succumb to feature bloat, change for the sake of change, and tooling churn.<p>Windows, Slack, and Spotify are perfect examples of once decent products that somehow get buggier, slower, and more confusing with every release.<p>Very few companies have the wherewithal to just pause, evaluate their product, and say: "nah, this is good".
Yes Spotify UI/UX is absolute garbage. It's not even possible to simply view a list of all songs by an artist. Also I had to turn off autoplay because the recommendation engine wouldn't stop autoplaying the same song.