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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

This is very surprising. The integration on iOS is unmatched (duh) but everything about Spotify is better.

I listen to some relatively obscure music, and Spotify never seems to have what I'm looking for, and if they do it's usually only their latest or most popular album. I switched to Apple Music over a year ago and their catalog seems drastically more complete.

I also like how well it integrates with Homepod. Homepod hasn't been well received but I personally love it. It can hear me from 30 feet away and it sounds incredible!

That is very interesting to hear. I should probably take it for a spin, then. The mobile app doesn't seem too bad but the thought of using iTunes again is dreadful.

For me Spotify is terrible. I don't know if it has been improved now but the UI experiences other than the look were unpolished and confusing. Worst of all, I didn't like the idea of playlist-based organizations over album-based organizations like iTunes/Apple Music. The songs were just so messy for minor music listeners like me.

I still don’t understand how Spotify doesn’t invest more in its iOS experience. Sure, they don’t have access to Siri, but that’s the only thing outside their control: The Spotify app takes far too long to load for a music player, even on an iPhone XS; the UI takes a one-size-fits-all approach to list views that looks slapdash compared to Apple Music’s nice album view; the now-playing screen is cluttered and still inexplicably hides the status bar on modern, large phones.

And don’t get me started on how they threw away their excellent iPad UI in favor of a blown-up version of the phone UI.

If Spotify is losing to Apple Music, the answer is a better core experience, not bundling Hulu.

The things I hate about the Apple app are the fact I can’t swipe from the left to queue a new song, and the fact that if you’re shuffling all songs then you simply can’t use the play next feature at all. That ability did exist at one point, along with play last (it would queue a song at the end of the play next queue, but before the rest of the shuffled songs), but it’s been removed since iOS 9 or 10 now.

I'm not sure when you last checked, but you can add songs either next in the queue or at the end of the queue when shuffling songs.

I've just tested this on iOS 12.2.

While you can't swipe to queue, you can force-touch on a song to bring up the quick menu, and then release over 'play-next'. A different gesture, but still a single gesture/tap.

You're right, I just tested as well. Thanks for letting me know!

I agree but wonder if this is a sign of music streaming becoming a utility? Do most users care about sophisticated discovery and recommendation engines? Or do they just want billboard 100 hits?

I think that is exactly it. For a pretty casual music listener like myself, I don't find a whit of difference between Apple Music and Spotify. Not that I've made a deep study of it, but then I'm a casual user.

Given that I'm pretty much all in on Apple otherwise, Apple Music seems like the natural choice to me.

I've actually found Apple Music and Spotify to have around the same quality recommendations. Both have a Discover Weekly feature, both will let you create "stations" from a song or artist. Neither are great or innovative in any way but they sort of get the job done. The recommendations are miles ahead of YouTube but that's not saying much.

What about Amazon Music? It has all those same features.

Amazon music has two variants, the kind that comes with prime, and unlimited. The unlimited variety is price competitive with Apple Music I believe.

My experience with the prime version has been poor. Aside from selection, it is just not a well written service. Replay bugs are common, and it regularly decides to change what station I was listening to for no discernible reason. The “stations” are clearly just playlists, because if you listen long enough they end up looping.

If it wasn’t free, I wouldn’t use it.

Apple Music is mostly human-curated, Spotify is programmatic. That’s why I prefer thr latter.

That's incorrect. Apple Music have a lot of programmatic recommendations. New Music Mix is programmatic. As is clicking on any song and creation a station from it.

I find apple music's recommendations better than Spotify's.

I still find Pandora to have the best recommendation engine in that it actually finds songs I like.

Apple Music does have a larger library. I also think both of the services have reached a point of "good enough". If you want to stream and play music, they both work well enough.

I'd say Apple's iOS apps are mostly the best, and sadly also because of access to private APIs.

Never really digged the über dark theme of Spotify, used to be less dark —and nicer to my taste— when I started using it back in 2008 on macOS –when they _did_ have a native app.

Except uploading my own music and the library. I found a lot of "unavailable" songs in Spotify and ditched them.

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