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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Spotify on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of an app nowadays.

I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their users as adults with agency, they really want to drip-feed them with "recommendations" from their glorified Markov chain. "What do you mean, 'browse the works of an artist'? No, have a 'radio station' of their albums instead."

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I was very sorry to notice Spotify getting worse and worse. It seems that now the app won’t display anything without an internet connection, or certain items that were downloaded don’t appear in the list. What’s the point of downloading songs for offline use if you can’t even navigate to them?

The desktop app is also getting worse. After a certain period of time clicking play simply has no effect, so it needs to be regularly restarted.

I don’t normally enjoy these pile-ons complaining about a product, but I have the feeling it’s coming apart at the seams

> What’s the point of downloading songs for offline use if you can’t even navigate to them?

I've never understood that either. I have downloaded quite a few albums for offline listening throughout the years but now I have no way of removing them because there's no listing. From time to time I still stumble upon an album marked as downloaded so I get that one chance to remove it.

If you want to delete them all, just delete the entire app and reinstall?

> What’s the point of downloading songs for offline use if you can’t even navigate to them?

So you can listen to them without consuming potentially expensive mobile data.

I understand the point of the downloading media over wifi rather than mobile data. What I'm saying is that once I'm "offline" I can't navigate to a screen where I can click play on them

I don't know what Spotify is doing with the Android app. They seem to be pushing podcasts really hard and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop the app from doing that. I didn't enjoy using it at all.

I finally bit the bullet last month and moved to YouTube Music. Migration was a pain but I find the generated playlists better and the UX less painful to use.

The pushing of podcasts too much is what got me to leave Spotify too. I tried YouTube music for a while but I wasn't a fan of how my YouTube likes would get mixed up with the YouTube music. Disabling the setting would often get rid of songs too.

So I ended up buying a cheap Android phone ($190 USD for a very good phone - 8GB ram, 12gb space):

https://www.amazon.com/UMIDIGI-Unlocked-4150mAh-Capacity-Sma...

I use Firefox for YouTube with the following add-ons:

1. uBlock Origin

2. Video Background Play Fix add-on

This allows me to use YouTube as a background playback music player. And if needed, I use YouTube-dl to get the audio files and put them on the phone.

I have basically gone back to how I used to use MP3 players back in 2000s before streaming became a thing.

Newpipe is a good option too.

Looks like they optimized the hell of it to push shitty podcasts and local and popular artists.

Yet they don't even offer a top level menu item for podcasts, you have to dig though "My library", which is infuriating.

I've found their changes quite nice, however that's because I mostly use the app for podcasts.

Maybe they are pivoting?

Companies with 6 billions dollars in revenue don't really pivot. They are diversifying.

I guess they have determined it makes sense strategically. If I had to guess, podcasts and music listening are rival goods for a lot of their most valuable segments and they were worried about moves some of the new entrants in the market could have made. Might allow them to target new customers too. Hopefully more than the move will lose them in existing customers jumping ship.

Spotify essentially have no excess profit potential for music, because the labels will just take more money if and when Spotify increases subscribers/revenue.

This is in contrast to Podcasts, where nobody really owns the space, and they have a good shot at becoming the market leader.

I mean, I hate podcasts and wish they would go away from my Spotify, but I like the company and the music product, so I put up with it (for now, at least).

I use Spotify on Android regularly and can only somewhat relate to what you're describing: when I know the artist, but not the song title and I have to literally search through his discography. But even that is doable in one click (see discography) from the artist main page (tried it just now, up to date app on Android 10) and playing the song is just tapping on it.

For regular use the search button is right in the middle on the bottom of the app and right next to it is the button to my library

Your criticism seems a bit harsh to me.

It's always been hot garbage.

From breaking audio playback over bluetooth (who would possibly use spotify in the car while also using google maps! What a rare use case!) to incorrect song substitution on playlists, continuing to play audio after bt disconnect, etc. There's a 2 click guaranteed crasher in the version from a month ago on stock android on a pixel.

Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android. If I could figure out how to port ten thousand songs in a 150 playlists...

As an iOS user who has experienced some of these same issues, I can assure you that nobody at Spotify cares about my platform's app experience either.

The "continuing to play audio after bt disconnect" is particularly obnoxious to me, and has been happening for something like 5 years now. The latest update has trouble just scrolling through my entire Library, because why would anyone have more than a few dozen followed artists!?!?! (I have a couple hundred, and the latest update forced artists, playlists, and albums all to list together into one enormous muddle in Library).

>Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android

I bet that they all use macOS and their app macOS is really really shitty as well.

They removed back / forwards navigation with the keyboard when they redid artist pages yet again. It's only super annoying!

I’m also frustrated by this change. Very annoying that you can’t see all the songs by an artist.

Are you on the free tier? Free users can't even see individual songs anymore :(

That may be just it. I've been a paid pro user for almost a decade (back before and when their app was good); I ultimately abandoned my subscription when I realized I don't use the service much anymore (something about them suddenly losing quite a lot of mainstream-ish music).

That brush with their current app I described before happened when my wife wanted to evaluate Spotify subscription as a source of children songs. We both quickly realized that youtube-dl and manually copying MP3 files to the phone offers a much superior user experience to the Spotify app.

I can’t figure it out on Premium either, but if it’s actually just removed for free listeners then maybe it’s a money thing. Perhaps hiding direct song access pushes people to listen to music with cheaper royalties or something.

The Playstation app and Android TV apps randomly desync the UI from the content being played. It seems particularly problematic with Daily Mixes that change from time to time. Selecting a song (or hitting next) basically selects a completely random song to play.

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