Spotify Apps Suck | Hacker News Reader

Spotify Apps Suck

26 pointssubmagr32 comments

Is it just me (probably not) or Spotify apps suck in general.

I am a paid Spotify user for almost a year now. I use the web-based app https://open.spotify.com/ on my laptop and Android app on Samsung A6+ phone.

Web based App: https://open.spotify.com/ - The songs stops playing automatically often. I am talking about 2-3 times in an hour.

Android App: - Downlaoded songs simply doesn't work. Everytime I launch the app, it starts to download the songs again and it never stores it. - Even if I somehow manage to get the download working (by repeatedly trying), on being offline it ask me for login. I mean how can I login if I doesn't even have the internet. That's the whole point of being offline.

Sorry for the rant but will be great if someone can help me find out an alternative.

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Honestly, the two Spotify apps I regularly use (macOS and iOS) are some of the best apps I use. I’ve had small problems on the Windows app. But overall I find the Spotify experience fantastic. I have several thousand songs downloaded, and that works fine as long as I can keep the iOS from putting the app to sleep during a download.

In terms of alternatives, the Apple Music iOS app is pretty bad in terms of performance and bugs compared to Spotify. I can’t imagine the android app is much better.

I’ve heard that the other competitors are basically YouTube music or Amazon Music. Besides that, I guess there are the hi-fi options like Tidal. If I was going to try a different service, I’d probably go with YouTube Music so that I can also get YouTube premium.

If you find Spotify and Apple buggy, just wait until you try Amazon Music, Tidal or YT Music. It can be hard to start streams against Alexa devices, figure out what’s playing, move it from speaker to speaker, download tracks, keep listening to something you started playing but then it just decided not to continue playing, and so on… Mac apps behave badly, don’t focus when you alt-tab, don’t always use the right speaker output, don’t automatically set output bitrate for HD tracks (you had one job, Amazon!)

Spotify may have problems, and I subscribe to all but Tidal at this point, but Spotify’s app is not a reason to stop using Spotify unless you really like giant album art, maybe. Or 24-bit FLAC. Spotify’s streaming quality is second worst, the only one worse than Spotify is YouTube on a random video rather than an officially uploaded song…

Spotify a year or so ago added a button to "hide a song" if you don't like it. I think this is a good feature, but they put it right where the add to playlist button was at the top of options for a song.

This

Stupid

Why would you put a less used button so far up the options list? Why would you put it right where my most used button is? This was the worst UI decision I've ever seen and I hope there is a dev on this thread that can go tell the UI people to fix this.

I can't count the times I've wanted to throw my phone against a wall exactly because of this. They are usually very good at UX but this one throws me off _every_ time.

Reminds me of Google Meet: https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui.html

It probably looks great in a picture, but it's indeed a UX nightmare.

For me, playback of new songs often just doesn't happen on iOS. The app doesn't start playing the song at all. I need to like the song which I think makes the song available offline. This usually helps.

Omg. I am so surprised that their iOS app is buggy too. I thought it was just my crappy android phone.

I’ve been using the iOS app for 6 years without any problems. (Similar for my acquaintances) It’s odd that it varies so much

My main gripe with the iOS app is how they handle offline playback and support. There are two really distinct offline/online modes in the app and you will often have to explicitly switch your phone to airplane mode in order to kick it into it's offline mode and get access to your downloaded music. If you don't do this and happen to go through some patchy network area (like for instance the stairwell in my building) it will continuously try to load album artwork etc. and block rending of the rest of the UI so you can't even hit play on audio you've already cached/downloaded for offline use.

Been using the Apps for a few years and can't say I share the same problems.

Can we talk about their insanely bad UI for a moment? The UI to play through things NOT as shuffle is unreal. Just look how hidden it even is on their website [0]. Consider how hard it is to play an audiobook, or an album in order.

Further, I have never once wanted to shuffle-play (I just don't like it). But I constantly have to uncheck shuffle on my playlists.

I would conjecture that it is intentional at Spotify to balance out per-play payments. But I doubt Spotify will confirm/deny this.

[0]. https://support.spotify.com/us/article/play/ <- search for "To play in the order listed" . good luck.

What about UX though? Why on earth I cannot view all songs from one artist on mobile or web app (only desktop). I can only view all albums, so I should google which album the given song belongs to? I can search of course, but what if I don't remember the name exactly and will remember when I see it? What kind of PM or designer would think it's a great idea is beyond me. This is just one example, the app as a whole is almost as unintuitive as it can get compared to e.g. google music that was killed. It took me a while to discover how to view other songs for an artist, for example, and I doubt I'm alone here.

Android app: It works fine on my S10. It can glitch out sometimes, but that is rare. I admit I almost never use the offline functions. So maybe that part of the app is not well-made.

Web app: I don't use the web app.

Mac/Windows app: I use these and they work flawlessly for me. Maybe you can try this instead of the web player. Web apps are often trash, so I won't be surprised if Spotify's was too.

I once listened, partially, to a single “Learn Japanese” podcast. Now months later my Spotify homepage still recommends Japanese language learning podcasts every single day.

I’m currently checking out YouTube Music. The deal is quite good, since it comes with YouTube Premium. In my experience the algorithm feels better, and you tend not to wind up on less “meh” recommendations.

I originally registered Spotify because of the recommendations, but it feels like YouTube is just much more spot on. Maybe it's time to switch.

In case you’re still looking for a better recommendation system, I use https://last.fm/, I’ve found its recommendations the best. In other respects it’s a bit annoying (it plays music via Spotify and that connection doesn’t always work).

Spotify's recommendations were really good at the beginning. But now it's just meh. I haven't found anything interesting in Discover Weekly for months.

That wasn't in my initial plan, but I'm considering adding user recommendations to https://volt.fm. Something like Twitter, but for sharing music with your friends.

I don't know about Youtube Music, but Google Play Music had no problems in deleting entries from your own playlists when a song wasn't available anymore. It's a form of musical gaslighting which I find entirely unacceptable. We have emotional ties to some music, so editing my own handmade playlists without my consent, and leaving no trace of the activity feels like a violation. That single behavior has stopped me from trusting Google with anything ever again.

Spotify leaves the songs there even if they are unplayable, but my playlists are still there.

Is that true?

>since it comes with YouTube Premium.

I can't find info on it.

https://www.youtube.com/premium

I am also a recent switcher to Youtube Music and love the recommendations. Also not having podcasts I don't want pushed at me is so nice.

I was a youtube/google play music subscriber for years who recently switched to spotify and I think the same about the opposite! When I moved to spotify I thought the recommendations were better. Now reading your experience I think that maybe they aren't better, just different.

Youtube music is really a shame. It was a big step back from google play music. Sorting liked albums & songs is difficult. If you like a video on youtube that happens to be music, it will always show up in your liked songs in youtube music. Having such crappy streaming options just makes me want to go back to pirating.

Spotify made much of their work model - completely autonomous teams working on whatever they thought was most important. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the reasons their app sucks is because of that. User interfaces don't really work when designed by committees.

Downloads gone after every update, downloaded albums in your favourite songs list, Chromecast integration spotty. The list goes on and on. That's what you get for 10-ish $ a month.

Agile-mumbo-jumbo idiots.

Most of their effort now seems to be driven by saving them money, hence the big podcast push. Every time you listen to a podcast instead of music costs them less money so their profit from you goes up.

If you are blocking any of their ip addresses (e.g. to reduce ads) then the songs might not load. Worth checking I suppose.

I’m mainly using their desktop app and the only issue I have seen is that the volume slider jumps a bit when I am connected to Spotify on multiple devices.

Interesting. This might indeed be the case. I am so deep into ad-blockers and vpn stuff. Thanks for the tip. Will check and udpate here.

I think the biggest problem about Spotify is that they don't pay artists fairly. The money mostly go to big artists and independents get scraps. When they "fix" this problem, I might start using their apps, otherwise I feel it is unethical.

how is the money distributed? I never heard about this problem. Do you have more info on the topic? Also what do you think is the fair distribution?

I installed spotify using flatpak on my manjaro and it has been running without any issues. The android/ipadOS app works without issue for me too.

In their defense, so does the Apple Music app.

Of course they do. Spotify sells a service, the apps are not the primary product. But there is no ecosystem of alternative apps because Spotify has locked down the API. Why should they care about them?

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