- You cannot shift+click select to easily add playlists into a folder.
- Any podcasts you follow cannot be moved into folders to tidy things up. They just clutter the sidebar.
- You have to click on a tiny arrow to expand a folder. Clicking on the folder navigates inside the folder.
The fact that podcasts are in the same Spotify mega-app is terrible too. And the podcast experience is a complete mess.
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.
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.
And they actually think they are doing a good job at it.
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 need to be good. People pay to access Spotify's library of music and podcasts, despite the UI.
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 awful 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.
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.
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.
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).
Apple Music isn’t perfect, but it has a more focused UI that makes it easier to find music.
I wish Spotify/Deezer/Apple had an SDK like libspotify used to be so that one could just write a simpler & faster client.
The other one, I was not able to "teach" the algorithm what I like even after 3 months.
It's barely usable for radio plays (favorites, queue, last played, ...) as it does act on songs not albums in general.
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.
On Linux is even worse.
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?
Not great when you’re trying to listen to a 700 episode series!
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.
I remember when Spotify heavily optimised to play music in the quickest possible time. Enshittification indeed.
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?)
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.
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 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.
No correlation implied.
When you have investors pushing money to spend, project managers that have to show something, 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.
Windows, Slack, and Spotify are perfect examples of once decent products that somehow get buggier, slower, and more confusing with every release.
Very few companies have the wherewithal to just pause, evaluate their product, and say: "nah, this is good".
* $ sudo apt install vlc fzf
* $ rvlc "$(ls | fzf)"