I should be able to control and start playing music on my Apple watch on any Apple device from any Apple device, whether that be a HomePod (mini), iPhone, or Apple TV. Yet this isn’t possible. Bluetooth used to be just as, if not more, seamless, and it was more performant. I can’t believe I’m saying that.
Even the error messages are comical. Attempts to do this in certain scenarios will overtly claim multiple people are trying to play music and attempt to coerce me to upgrade my plan so that multiple people can play music on multiple devices at the same time. I’m single and live alone. I just want to easily play music everywhere in my apartment, easily transfer music from my TV to my bathroom speaker without losing my place in the playlist or podcast, or change what’s playing using my Apple Watch because I decided that I’d like to hear something different emanating from the other room without getting up to find my phone.
I’ll cut this short before it becomes a screed, but I’ll close with this. I just asked Siri to play music on one of my HomePod Minis to verify my claim about being unable to control devices by saying the simple phrase, “Hey Siri, play music.” And the response I got was, “Sorry, [name]. Something went wrong and I couldn’t resume.” So I said, “Hey Siri, play music from Apple Music” and she immediately started playing “a station I might like”. This whole system is broken.
Of course, when I dropped the “from Spotify”, there was an app that only played the Beatles. With ads.
>When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.
He wrote it in the context of Twitter/Facebook, but it fits for other 'closed' ecosystems like the Apple ecosystem.
>UX Erosion, n; 1. shiny new service & concept appears with great UX that attracts creators, followed by a slow undermining of that UX, transitioning from delight-oriented to lock-in, habit, and apathy.
You can test this out quite easily: play any audio from your mac (YouTube, Apple Music, whatever) and then try to pause it on your watch. This is not possible.
Spotify Connect allows you to do this easily on the other hand.
Still, this does not seem to be what OOP wants.
Because owning a ton of Apple devices lets you show off to other people how cool you are, and earns Apple a ton of money. Why should they bother fixing this stuff when Apple users will buy all-Apple devices no matter how badly they work together?
They clearly get away with this because whatever you'd change it with you'd be far worse off.
You can look at it as others catching up or Apple slowing down, but the bottom line is that Apple isn't ahead of the pack anymore on this. I think they've focused so much on supply chain logistics and hardware that they've completely lost sight of the core day-to-day software user experience that originally created that die-hard Apple loyalty.
Recall that Apple bought Beats to acquire the music streaming platform that Beats was developing with the purpose of turning it into Apple Music. To me this always seemed like a bit of a weird move since Apple could obviously build their own music streaming service without acquiring a company to do so. My guess is that someone at Apple who's more of a business person than a product person wanted Apple to have a Spotify competitor ASAP and saw the acquisition of Beats as a quick way to get there (with means that a business person can carry out: acquisitions). The acquisition happened, Beat's tech was turned into Apple Music (probably with time to market as the key metric that management cared about), Apple Music was released. Then the business person was happy, called it a day, and moved on.
Had Apple put their own focus and top talent into Apple Music the way they did with iTunes and iTunes Store back when iPod was their main cash cow, then I think Apple Music would have been very different. But alas, "music streaming" is probably just a check mark in someones list of services that Apple should have, and it's already checked so the job is done :)
It seems other people have asked for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/qeb883/continui...
EDIT:
But it does handoff from current device to AirPods when you put them in, so there's that.
I was going to stop by to post about the feature, documented on the above page, under “Play audio on a HomePod using Control Center”
If it showed up anywhere in future, it would be there, I think, in the list of AirPlay devices.
I can say I’ve had the opposite problem, where I’m on Spotify on one device and, while playing, would want to use a second device to preview tracks. But the Spotify model only lets you play in one location at a time. I do like the Spotify model most of the time, though.
So one of my favourite things about Spotify is that this doesn't happen.
However, unless I have the Music app still installed on the iPhone, the car's entertainment system doesn't show what's playing with Spotify and most times when I plug it in it plays from the Music app instead of Spotify and I have to switch apps. So I installed the Music app again and sync'd a single "silent" track with an exclamation icon album art and a track title saying "Switch Apps".
It's really annoying that when I had to buy a new car in 2019 after my old one was written off, that Apple CarPlay wasn't available in Hondas in South Africa except in Civics and CRVs or better, even though in other countries it was. I'd been holding off buying a new car until CarPlay was available and been telling the sales reps as much each time I'd look while dropping my car off for a service.
Most newer cars won't do this, and you may be able to shut it off in your car's settings somewhere.
It seems like my car instantly presses "Play" when plugged in, if the Music app was already loaded, then it continues where it left off, but if the Music app wasn't loaded, then iOS loads the music app but instead of making the iPod interface wait until it's loaded where I left off, it instead plays the default list of everything in your library alphabetically. It feels like a kind of race condition which was just never considered by Apple.
Then consider the problems with Spotify. If it was recently playing and I plug it in, then the radio uses Spotify, otherwise it uses the Music app and I need to switch to Spotify on the phone. If the Music app is uninstalled completely, then the iPod interface doesn't work properly, it doesn't show track names or the artwork. It seems highly unlikely to me that Spotify is using the wrong iOS APIs, so I expect the blame here also most lies with Apple.
I acknowledge that other cars may not have this problem, but I can't see why Apple couldn't make their software more robust here. Anyway, this is also why I stated my annoyance at the not having the option of CarPlay since it delegates more control to my iPhone, meaning I get innovation and bug fixes on the screen my car on Apple's timelines as opposed to "when I get a new car", and even then, the car companies have far fewer software development resources so can't possibly hope to keep up with the likes of Apple.
You get a few mails? All lockscreens will show the popups until i manually remove them from every single device, ridiculous.
There isn't, they just don't have to try that hard, because of the myriad of other reasons people continue to pay Apple.
(I don't use Apple Music or a HomePod, so no idea if this is new)
The feature I miss most is the weekly playlist followed closely by the multiple daily’s.
I use my MBP through a USB-C dock with an external SSD attached and whenever Time Machine or CCC triggers a backup my audio starts skipping. Sure, that isn’t Apple Music’s fault, but it’s part of the ecosystem and that kind of performance should be considered when designing the system.
And then the UI. All web views with click delay.
I like exploring jazz and electronic genres but navigating and scrolling to start one sub-genre takes like 30 seconds. There’s no way to pin genres that you like or hide genres you don’t care about.
I feel like my collection of music from 2000s is gone, even though it was uploaded to the cloud or something … through some apple program 10 years ago. I still have the metadata of my collection but even that is just a facade.
I just started playing a Youtube video and a Spotify song, then clicked on the audio button in the Touch Bar and it looks like this, double clicking the icon opens the appropriate app (opened that through the Control Strip, enabled in the Keyboard settings): https://ibb.co/6Pr1V6x
Though I guess the point is moot since the Touch Bar seems to be being phased out, and also due to the existence of 3rd party apps...
1. It has come a long way. iTunes really was a horrible piece of shit software for many years. It is much much much better now.
2. There isn't any viable alternatives. I don't care what people say, I've tried them all.
IMO there's two bigger issues that really prevent anyone from competing and improving the status quo:
a. You need to be friends with the music industry to be in this field, and to retain this friendship there's a lot of things you just can't do. Imagine if something like these flash widgets that you could embed in your website to stream your favorite playlists could still exist.
b. The Apple ecosystem is preventing a lot of people (I believe a majority of phones are iPhones in the US) from moving to competitors and improve competition.
Speak for yourself. iTunes user interface was so much easier on the computer to use than the current mess that is the Music app on the computer. I'd love to get the old iTunes app back.
The problem was more that it was also managing files on your office, doing firmware updates and a whole load of unrelated crap.
And it still does all this on windows.. :/
Now, people got what they wished for: iTunes split into a million pieces, with every piece crappified in the process. Just yesterday Music automagically fetched some wrong album art for a track I added, and after adding the correct image, I couldn’t delete that wrong one for two minutes, until I suddenly could (I just kept pressing delete, god knows what was going on). Ugh.
They also do multi device so much better. It take feels "Apple". If I'm playing music on my phone I can actually change the song on a third party client on my FreeBSD desktop which isn't supported by Spotify at all.
Spotify really does a lot of those things "you just can't do" and they aren't even big friends with the music industry (though I guess despite their initial battles they are now)
I think Apple Music turns 15 years old this year (released in iOS 1)...it hasn't come that far in all that time.
Sound quality is better, artist are getting pay more and I have more music available(Joanna newsom, skeemask)
Moreover, if we're looking at the content itself, if you like some niche or more specific genres, you're out of luck. The music is there, but your only hope to find more of it is relying on public playlists created by the community.
I really do hope that Spotify nails it with its Hi-fi sub. The difference in sound quality is very noticeable to me.