>What goes into these people's minds? Can someone shed some light?
Maybe I can shed _some_ light.
I worked for one of the big music streaming services for a while.
>limited valuable real estate on a mobile device.
Maximizing data density on a screen is absolutely not a goal on any 'large audience' app.
Yes, an app with tons of data crammed on a screen would make some folks happy in the HN/geeky communities (I am not sure that's true actually, but that's something that I often see power users asking for).
That's not who these apps are targeting though.
The design of these apps is often a mix between opinionated choices (basically what is trendy right now in the design circles) and what works in user testing.
Turns out, most of our users are ABSOLUTELY lost when they have to interact with a mobile app.
Music streaming services have way too many features :
albums
playlists
radios
some kind of AI powered automatically created track lists (all services give this a different name, but they all have pretty much the same feature)
lyrics,
podcasts
On top of that, there is a ton of data for every single track :
title
album
artist
composer !!!! (classical music treatment is usually awful in any streaming app) .
has lyrics ?
is downloaded on your device ?
The player adds another layer of complexity :
current track
queue
random mode
repeat mode
Here is the dirty little secret of the music streaming industry : how to present all this in a way that allows random users (not geeks) to efficiently interact with the app : nobody knows how to do that :/ .
There is just way too many information to cram on a screen.
To pile on that, usual development cycles are focused on releasing new features, either to keep up with the competition or because that's how PMs demonstrate that they are 'improving' the app.
It is orthogonal to actually improving the user experience and we can see cycles of several years where the UI becomes more and more bloated with random stuff until designers are able to push a redesign with half of the features.
And soon we start cramming features again until the end of this new cycle.