Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective
michaelevensen.com
michaelevensen.com
Product (applicable to iOS and web):
* Their mobile app and desktop products are, essentially, two completely different experiences. They have not evolved in sync with each other at all.
* Listening to tracks I've saved is hidden deep, deep within the app.
* Social capabilities don't exist in the app. Inexplicably, it's most of what exists on the desktop product.
* Oh look, I got a notification on the app. Who knows what it's about, though, no way to find out.
* 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't want it messing with album artwork.
* Every aspect of the web product screams 'we just cloned every other social network out there all at once'. It's a messy hodgepodge of features, 80% of which I don't use.
Technical:
* 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's a mess.
A shame because the 'magic moment' 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'm frustrated because I truly believe it could be great. Unfortunately, their product and technical teams have not kept up.
Firefox and Safari don't seem to have these issues.
As someone who has published over 100 of my own recordings on SC, interaction with fans is paramount, and the mobile app just plainly sucks at it - it is more of a 'quickie consumer' gateway, not a social experience at all.
At this point I'd say essentially no-one feels loyalty to the soundcloud brand, and few trust the service to listen to its users (both content creators or consumers). A risky place to be as a consumer facing business.
I like what is has become.... if you already know what artist you want to listen to.
- The push notification randomness is annoying, I've never responded to a push, except as a shortcut to open the app to get to the artist I wanted
- My most annoying gripe was that it forces you to sign up if you want to retain history (or follow an artist to at least have them in your feed)
- But after you sign up it is just as forgetful as ever, except if you follow an artist they'll be in your feed... somewhere....
My use case for Soundcloud is mostly listening to sets, often featuring rare material, well done by crate diggers as well as keeping up with some smaller labels I enjoy. Frankly, these days I'd prefer to do that on Mixcloud, which isn't flawless but at least gets the basics right, like remembering my play queue and current position.
Sidenote: When speaking about Soundcloud's mobile app one has to mention the fact that there is a seperate app, Pulse, just to handle comments and notifications which seems insane to me. As a content creator I use it, but don't see how this couldn't be integrated into the already existing app which apparently is for consumption only.
and thanks god for that!
* 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.
* On accounts that update regularly, you have to refresh recent tracks manually every time, as it aggressively caches results which are usually weeks old.
* The player interface is too minimal. It puts so much emphasis on the track cover which is silly because it's a music app.
* The touch gestures are annoying and it's too easy to go accidently to the next track when you are seeking through a track
Seeing screenshots of the old app, it looks more like an upgrade of the current app.
Yes, this drives me mad! I didn't know if this was something only I encountered, but apparently not. In my situation it loses track of what I was listening to in a matter of minutes. Pause music to talk to someone for a bit? I hope I remembered where in the track I was because I'm going to have to search for it again and start over!
That's the other thing...there's no history or queue of music (or, I haven't found it). I end up favoriting things because then it's easier to find again once the app inevitably screws up my listening progress.
I tried searching for a solution (or to see if it was someone's idea of a "feature") but it's a hard thing to describe.
Mixcloud is far better for this, history, remember where you were in a song, even if you listen other song after.
You listen a mix, want to change and you listen others, when play again the first mix, it plays where you stopped, so great.
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.
Let me know if you have any specific questions or input.
Guess I'll toss in my own gripe. I played an album for my newborn daughter to put her to sleep. Some nice soothing acoustic guitar. Yet when it reaches the end it just auto plays some other loud rock track instead of stopping or giving the option to loop. Made my own playlist of the same tracks from the album hoping that would stop the offending track from playing at the end, but no such luck.
Am I missing something stupid? I can't even figure out how it is selecting this other random track to play at the end of my playlist.
What you're referring to is the autoplay of related tracks. Great feature for background listening - not so much for your use case :)
You can turn it off by going to the options screen. Go to the "person" icon tab, then the 3 dots button on the top right. De-select "Autoplay related tracks".
Any other feedback and I'd love to hear it. You can always DM me on Twitter @colemercer as well, I keep it open.
I think that statement goes to show how bad the new app is - because the old one was awful. I've been a pretty hardcore SC user since it first launched and was mainly full of home recordings. The first app was pretty bad, then they made it significantly worse with the new one. They also have 'pulse' for creators which is inexplicably missing features you would expect it to have.
The original website was actually pretty good although by the time it came to the release of the new one it hadn't been updated in a long long time. The new one looks better but performs much worse. On a slow internet connection it is completely unusable.
I can't see who liked or shared my mixes or tracks. Comments are impossible.
And the search annoys me. I'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...
I could go on but I feel that many of the points have been mentioned before...
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'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.
Overall I'm happy they cleaned up the app and dropped the old webapp features.