Dear Spotify, stop treating your users like testers | Hacker News Reader

Dear Spotify, stop treating your users like testers

anandtyagi.medium.com

75 pointsananddtyagi100 comments

They honestly can't write an Andoid app to save their life.

"Hey! Here's a notification for a new podcast! Want to click on it and see the episode details? Fuck you, here is the Spotify home screen instead."

"Yeah, you know those 278 songs you have stored locally? I'm going to re-download the whole lot just because I feel like it."

"Oh, you've clicked on a link to a playlist? Extra fuck you, here's the Spotify home screen, search for it yourself."

"Oh, you were just playing a podcast in a different app, paused it by your headphones, and then press play again? Well fuck that podcast app I'm taking over."

//edit// Sorry - forgot one

"I see you want to play some music you have downloaded when you're in a bad network area. Sucks to be you, I'm going to spend 5 minutes auditing all your cellular and wifi connectivity before I can be bothered to draw the screen or show you a song list."

//end of edit//

Honestly, it's a complete clown show and the only thing going for it is the licensing of so much music.

Oh, you follow this artist? We won't notify you when they have new releases or put their new music in the "new music for you" list, but we will give you seven notifications about a show they're playing on the other side of the country in two months.

Oh, you want to start playing multiple albums from a queue, respecting the order? Can't just do that from the app startup, you have to start playing something, enqueue the albums, and then skip whatever is playing.

Literally five minutes ago, I opened Spotify to start my music. I see "Your settings are located here" pointing to my profile. I went "...cool?" and tried to dismiss it, as it was covering up the first Likes Playlist I wanted to go to.

Spent 10 seconds waiting for it to go away, followed by a few more just to dismiss it (you can't), just to have to go all the way into settings and back out just to play my music.

Wild.

What do we think the average comp of the people implementing all this awfulness? 200k?

In the early days of spotify, I remember reading blog posts about focusing hard on the core deliverable: the play button works reliably and with low latency, just like an iPod with local storage. Over the networks of the day, this was especially difficult but with focus and determination they pulled it off.

Over the years, it has been sad to watch reliability and latency regress to the web-age mean (mediocre and so high as to frequently complicate interaction).

my current spotify peeve: hitting play when I have no connectivity results in.... nothing. Absolutely nothing. No discernable activity of any kind.

Disabling wifi & data works, but just being without an active connection - such as when underground or something - and wanting to play some music or a podcast that is on the device already just doesn't seem to occur to spotify as a valid scenario.

I have been dealing with this for about a year now. I listen on my motorcycle while out in the sticks often, and because service is so spotty, I keep a huge library local on my device. However I don't put it in offline mode since often enough I do have service.

Once I get that "No internet connection available" message, the amount of coaxing to get it to play locally saved music is insane. Usually it is some combo of app restarts, toggling "offline mode", and toggling airplane mode on my phone that will eventually get it to play.

Spotify. Please figure out the surely 5 lines of code that would fix this. I'm sure this bug even predates my finding of it.

If people keep paying them even though it doesn’t work right then why would they fix it?

This is the reason I left Spotify for Apple Music

I forgot that one - drives me round the twist.

I've always thought it would be great to do a Reddit-style "AMA" with the developers of crappy apps like this and put them on the spot to justify all these awful decisions. Bonus points if they are honest! Who knows, there may be good or bad reasons for all of these, but we'll never know because unlike Open Source, for commercial software there's never a public mailing list where bugs and features get discussed.

It would be refreshing to hear some Product Manager say "Yea, that feature is terrible and anti-user, but it juices our MAU metrics which means huge bonus for me!"

> "Oh, you were just playing a podcast in a different app, paused it by your headphones, and then press play again? Well fuck that podcast app I'm taking over."

I think that one is an Android issue. I have a handful of media apps, and with both bluetooth and wired headphones, the result of hitting the play/pause button is often completely random.

* If something is playing, sometimes hitting the button will pause it, other times it will start some other app playing.

* If I just paused something 5 seconds ago, sometimes the play button will resume that, other times it will start something I was listening to an hour or more ago.

* Also, occasionally, it just refuses to respond to the button at all. I used to think this was just my earbuds being buggy and not recognizing my taps, but I got a different pair that makes a ding sound when sending the play/pause command, so now I know when it's the earbuds vs the phone that's being a dick.

I think the problem started around Android 10 or 11. Before that, starting one media thing would boot out the previous one. Now they just hang around like zombies waiting to hi-jack your play/pause commands.

Maybe? I think I've only ever seen it go one way though. I don't think I've seen the podcast app take over playing from Spotify.

Yeah, I don't actually use spotify, but I've seen this behavior with a combination of Audible, Libby, Smart AudioBook Player, Youtube, Nebula, and Plexamp.

Smart AudioBooks Player is by far the best behaved of the bunch. I think it's partially because it's entirely offline, and partially because it's not trying to sell me anything. It's so much better that I will sometimes extract my audiobooks from other platforms (Audible, Chirp, Libro.fm, etc.), reformat/de-DRM as necessary, and then move them over to SABP to actually listen to them.

Plexamp is probably second best. I find the UI a little confusing, but it mostly just does what I want when I want to listen to my music.

In the past, I used Podcast Addict to listen to a lot of podcasts. It was pretty well behaved also. But I got tired of all the adds and filler in the podcasts themselves and mostly switched over to audiobooks. When I do want to listen to a podcast, I've found that, with sponsorblock, youtube is actually the least annoying option these days But even with that I no longer consistently listen to any podcasts.

They've done a lot worse [0]!

Despite what the quote in the article from a spotify rep says, the desktop app continued to burn massive amounts of write into hard drives for quite a while. From what I saw in the year or so after, the "fix" seemed to throttle the pointless write frequency based on disk IO. Not so bad if you were trudging along on platters. If your SSD was fast/expensive enough it could top a TB of write in 24 hours.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/for-f...

Yea was just listening to a song on the Android app today, paused it on my Airpods to talk to someone, then tried to resume and nothing would play. Played something on a separate podcast app to test if there was an issue with my phone audio or headphones or something and that played without issue. Had to restart Spotify for the audio to start working again. What a joke - I mean the company is worth $30b and the app literally has one job.

And I can't wait to have to start clearing many annoying audio book popups when I just want to listen to music, like I currently have to do with podcast popups.

The main issue with the android app for me is how slow it is. Everything seems to take anywhere between 500ms to 2 seconds. The worst is the play button, which is arguably the most important feature in the entire app. I've tried using the iOS app on my gf's iPhone and it's blazingly fast. The android app feels like it's an order of magnitude slower.

There's a dozen other big-name music apps out there. Try one of those? I've been pretty happy with Google's YouTube Music.

> They honestly can't write an Andoid app to save their life.

How could it be? They make an intelligence test with 5 seconds to solve linear systems!

Maybe it’s because Android is a shitty OS to develop for because they want to make everybody happy at the expense of a streamlined development experience.

Spotify is something that I'll pay for, forever - even in my grave. The thing is it's an absolutely horrible service, with a rubbish application, amazingly across all platforms.

But their catalogue is incredible. I keep trying to use alternatives, and they're not even close - especially when you listen to music in multiple non English geographies and languages. Their cross-language algorithmic suggestions have also been (shockingly) on point, and improving. But lord, their applications are beyond horrible.

I've gone back to just buying music on bandcamp and using subsonic. I might not have every artist and album but it's nice to support smaller musicians and at least I can choose which horrible client I want to use.

I have done the same but I use funkwhale for hosting. That way I can have with close friends who have similar music taste create a decent music library.

But those aren't even close to what Spotify provides -- my Release Radar is 6 hours which today is 121 artists, not counting collabs, that dropped new music this week. If the only time you check in on artists today is when the drop an LP then you miss like half their stuff.

Does Release Radar consistently function properly for you? I follow a lot of artists, and for the past year I've found my Release Radar is always buggy in various ways. Each week the bottom ~quarter of the playlist is stuff from previous weeks, usually last week but sometimes older. Among songs that are actually new, sometimes the order of songs in the list randomly changes slightly once or twice during the week. And I've even had a few times where most of the playlist completely changed on a day other than Friday.

And now the past couple weeks, my Discover Weekly has been wonky too: almost every song is only 1 to 2 minutes long, and from random no-name artists who only have songs that are 1 to 2 minutes long.

I enjoy using Spotify overall, for finding new music (which I often then purchase my faves on Bandcamp or Beatport), but Spotify's bugginess is getting rather crazy-making.

How much of this can you realistically digest? How much of this infinite stream of music do you have a real connection to?

I listen to it every Friday religiously. I'm listening to it now. And if it's on my RR it's because I follow that artist and do have a connection to them and their music. I've seen almost all of them live.

Do you not want to hear new music from artists you like? I feel like this is a holdover from an era where you had like 6 cds you listened to over and and over in the car or an ipod where you loaded music onto it once and then kept it for 10 years.

I mean I was a DJ for quite a long time so listening to new music daily was like a second job. When I talked to people DJing and going through so much music the sentiment was almost always the same: going through this much music so fast changes how you listen to things and you connect less with it.

Do you do other things while listening? Like programming?

I've been trying youtube music. It's fine. The main annoyance is everyone uses spotify so sharing playlists is just impossible. Not sure about their non-english offerings.

My main annoyance is the amount of music missing from YT Music, especially parts of albums, but I still use it because it comes with my YT premium account. It's like, oh cool, they have this album! Oh crap, they only have a couple of songs from it. And don't even get me started on not skipping songs that I've thumbed down in a playlist, or not being able to like artists because it mucks up my YT video subscriptions. But despite all that, it's still my primary because the recommendation engine is leaps ahead of Spotify.

> But their catalogue is incredible.

I'm an Apple Music user but honestly there was not a single time where something was not available there. Even the tools for artists (Like https://cdbaby.com) usually just cross-upload to all the services.

I am in the same boat, though I don't think its the catalogue for me. All the major services have practically the same catalogue.

Its their recommendations and playlists. No one else is remotely close; the UI is absolutely dense with new music it thinks you might enjoy, left right and center, every button you press is like "hey here's a playlist" "hey what about this artist" "here's new music you'll like released this week". And: Its freakin good at it. Literally no one else in any industry has figured out recommending new products like Spotify has. Amazon recommendations suck. Netflix recommendations suck. I discover new artists legit daily via Spotify.

Apple Music and Tidal are empty in comparison. Its better at displaying the result of `GET /library` in a default SwiftUI table, if thats what you want.

Its the non-mobile experience. Apple Music is abhorrent on the web (which is necessary for AM subscribers on Linux/Windows? Maybe iTunes still works? Idk). Its better, but still pretty bad, on the Mac. Spotify has near-perfect parity across Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, in features, performance, and experience. Now; you can argue that, in an absolute sense, their UI is worse; I don't agree with this take, but its a reasonable one; at least its consistently worse across every platform.

And I'll go and say it: Its the bundling of Podcasts and Audiobooks. I don't love the UI they've built to get at all these features. But, I've switched my podcasts to Spotify, because I'm constantly shuffling between listening on Mac, iOS, Windows, and Linux; there are very few podcast apps that have a comprehensive library, have an S-Tier app on every consumer operating system + web, sync listening status/history, and are free* (because I already pay for Spotify).

So, yeah; I stan Spotify. I physically and deeply cannot vibe with the article. You're mad that they moved the... shuffle button? Seriously? If products don't innovate, nerds get mad. If they innovate too much, nerds get mad. The pace at which Spotify changes their product, usually for the better, is something every major company on the planet envies. Change isn't always good; but the ability to change is extremely good.

The catalogue is actually the reason I don't use Spotify because you can't upload to your own cloud library. Apple Music and YouTube Music both let you do that. Anything missing I just upload myself. There's lot of music that isn't available on any of the streaming platforms.

Every time I open their ios app I don't know what to expect. Often features that I so used to just stop working: they broke enqueue songs a few times, local music, sorting within playlists - all basic features.

And I don't even want to mention their persistance to show me podcasts (and now audiobooks) without an ability to get rid of them. In the app that most of their users solely use for music.

Spotify is doing its best to follow enshittification playbook.

10+ years and still no light theme for people with astigmatism who may prefer that

yet they seem to re-arrange the UI layout every few months for no discernable benefit

Getting my eyes tested for the first time and finding out I have astigmatism in one eye was eye opening (sorry). When blue LED panels started showing up in appliances everywhere I didn't understand why they were so popular. At night, I couldn't read the time on the microwave oven from across the room because it was so bright and smeared compared to red/amber lights. Now I realize it's just me..

We're not rare! Around ⅓ of the U.S. population has astigmatism.

You can work around this issue by curling your index finger tightly so it forms a tiny hole near the 2nd knuckle and looking through that. What you've got now is a makeshift pinhole camera that should fix any "smearing". It'll also help you see clearly at a distance without glasses!

Ah, this explains why squinting my eyes has the same effect, for example, when I’m trying to read a menu that’s being a counter at a coffee shop.

> for no discernible benefit

They notice that majority of the users spend more time listening to the 'automation' of growing your playlists, auto-play similar songs in the end of your songs, etc. So maybe their changes anger you, me, and a few others, the majority absorbs them without a thought.

You can use https://github.com/spicetify to customize the appearance

thanks

The other day they randomly changed the “Like” button for an “Add to Playlist” one. Though they did communicate that change pretty clearly (there was a popup notifying the user about this behaviour etc.), I think it was a horrible spontaneous decision. I’m glad they reverted the thing the same day it was rolled out. Why doesn’t Spotify add an opt-in for experimental features/updates or distribute an “experimental” version of the app through app stores?

The like button disappeared for me a while ago and was replaced by a ⊕ that adds it to the "liked songs" playlist. Are you saying your app still shows the heart button to like a song? Or are you talking about the thumbs-up button that was also removed at some point?

I liked the new add to playlist feature, at least on my iphone. I press it once to like the song and double press it to add to a playlist using a checkbox on a menu, and I can choose to take the song out of my liked playlist on that menu. This eliminated a few clicks and is easier while driving. Intuitive and easy to use once I recognized what they did.

Opt-in experiments carry a huge bias, which is hard to extrapolate to the general user base. As annoying as changes Spotify can be, at least it’s highly unlikely to be used for “important stuff” like emails or general business stuff. Easier to justify small annoyances.

Incentive folks to be part of the experiment via discounts

and the like/add button doesn't have consistent placement or action. on some screens it still behaves as a like button and sometimes it's on the left. i had muscle memory to tap it and found i was disliking songs i wanted to like.

I dislike the fact that on the changes on the Google Play Store, instead of listing the key changes, they have the boilerplate BS "we work to enhance...".

As a good practice, and having suffered from the stupid (and dick-ish imho) changes, I do not update their app, and I have my NoRootFirewall blocking plenty of their garbage IPs. This doesn't let me see my "annual lists" but I don't mind that a bit. Zero value vs some privacy.. I pick privacy every time.

I almost posted on HN the other day about the annoying podcast UX in Spotify. The Home > Podcast section on the Android app shows the most recent 8 podcasts you've listened to. If you follow more than 8 podcasts then you need to use the 'Your library' section to check if the other podcasts have new episodes.

Spotify will randomly choose new podcasts rather that play you new episodes of podcasts you are already following.

Edit: And the fact that I can't get a history of what I've played drives me up the wall. Podcasts and songs.

They seem to have a habit of making things worse every time they make a change, I wish they would just stop trying. I suppose they have the VC curse so a merely profitable buisness isnt enough they must constantly be spewing out new ideas in the hopes of prolonging the exponential curve a little bit longer.

The one that annoys me the most isn in fact that when I open the app I get some popup in my face about something. I only ever open the app with a mind to already doing something, so I always flick it away, then some time later sometimes regret it because I would actually like to see whats new and can't find a list of them anywhere, like some labyrinthine music menu stack

> They seem to have a habit of making things worse every time they make a change, I wish they would just stop trying.

It's an industry-wide problem. At some point the software is good enough, and should be considered "done". But there's still a development team sitting around--what should they do?? Developers gotta develop, so they'll just keep changing it forever.

I remember hearing the saying "Programmers are like beavers. Leave a beaver alone to decide what to do and they'll just keep building dams, regardless of the fact that their home is done." I don't know if that's really true about beavers, but it's true about software organizations. The whole software development team will just continue working on the software even long past the point where they're done.

I don't know if thats the entire thing though. There are thousands of annoyances and bugs a team could be spending their time fixing to really make the product great. It's not like its "done", in fact its going in the wrong direction. It's more of the "feature factory" mentality imo, a culture of throwing stuff out the door as fast as possible without regard for quality. Its reflective of poor internal incentives and culture.

Spotify is a public company!

Even worse, then?

The thing is that they perfected some of the app a long time ago but since they employ so many engineers they need to keep changing stuff even things that obviously was better before.

I think we have a term for that and it is over-engineering

I think the term is being human. There's probably a subset of employees that are motivated by doing something positive and new at their job which takes up a good portion of their life. It's fun to create things.

You see it in other apps as well. Things like the new Slack changes where I've yet to hear of anyone who asked for or liked them.

What would be better is if companies gave that need to create a better outlet than changing things for 100s of millions of people.

It's bizarre that article opens using Google as a GOOD example of how to treat users because they practically invented the "users are perpetual beta testers and we will never release a complete/stable product" method of software design/releases.

It's what finally pushed me off Android after a decade, and 3 years into my iPhone move, I haven't stopped appreciating feeling respected as a user relative to being in the Google ecosystem. I mean, Apple isn't perfect, but generally redesigns or changes will be announced by a real human at one of their big yearly events. And they seem to be pretty picky about doing that type of thing.

Google services are redesigned, shuttered, re-launched, rebranded, etc on a regular basis. Every new Android update the quick settings are completely redesigned, the settings app is completely redesigned, your messaging app would get redesigns from a Play Store update out of nowhere. Sometimes not even from the Play Store, they started getting into using server-side flags to enable UI redesigns so you open the app one day and it's completely redesigned, open it again the next and it's back to how it was before. Meanwhile I open Messages on my iPhone and it looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed at the iPhone reveal in 2007. And the Settings app looks and behaves pretty much like it did on launch too.

Google's approach seems to have become the default among many software companies over the past decade. I really hope people start to catch on with how much of a negative reputation it's gotten them these days and that methodology gets shed.

That's fair. I've been using Android for the past 10 years after originally using iPhones, and I definitely agree that it's frustrating how much each OS update changes the UI. I'm actually considering switching back after seeing Apple's more recent OS design updates. I find Google's updates on apps like docs and their work suite are a little more navigable than the Spotify desktop app UI changes, but that's definitely not the case for all their products. It's a good point that they did basically setup the idea of users being "perpetual beta testers". Nice insight!

I disagree that Google sets a good example with their "clings" that pop up and point out UI changes. (That's what they're called internally.) Clings are annoying and disruptive, and nearly all of them alert the user to an unwanted new feature. Visualize them as a pop-up ad placed for free by a promotion candidate who needs usage numbers artificially spiked to demonstrate impact, and you'll share my negative feelings about clings.

While I'm here, will the person at Spotify who writes the Tesla app's frontend please get the networking code reviewed by the app's backend team? The backend code reconnects immediately when the network changes (for example, when a car backs out of a driveway and switches from WiFi to cell), so the current song keeps playing and can sometimes even skip to the next song. But the UX is frozen, except for the spinning circle, for minutes, until it says something went wrong and waits for me to press play again. Every other part of the car handles network changes gracefully, except the Spotify app, and it's had this problem since the very first version. How can this be so broken for so many years?

> I disagree that Google sets a good example with their "clings" that pop up and point out UI changes.

I strongly agree with you. When I open an app I'm very familiar with, I'm usually on "autopilot" so I just muscle-memory mash whatever it is I wanted to accomplish by opening the app. Often I'll see one of those little popup things appear and then disappear since I already hit the button I wanted to do. I wonder if the popup thing had something important to say? Who knows! It's gone now.

Additionally, when I open an app, my goal is to accomplish a task, not fiddle around with your shiny new UI. I'm here to do a thing, please stop getting in my way.

Garbage UI paradigm.

> Often I'll see one of those little popup things appear and then disappear since I already hit the button I wanted to do. I wonder if the popup thing had something important to say? Who knows! It's gone now.

I thought I was the only one who got annoyed by this. I wish they had some kind of history or in app place to view the updates all together.

Interesting view! I hadn't thought about them as pop-up ads. Probably the ideal version of an update is that it works and adds to your existing flow seamlessly, but I wonder what the best way is to intro new features that are separate from your existing workflow... not sure.

Every day, thousands of people use a given app for the first time. We don't bombard them with pop-ups for every single feature. Yet they manage to become proficient.

There's this wonderful expression that people don't buy a half-inch drill bit; rather, they buy a half-inch hole. Every team thinking of adding another cling should ask whether they're selling bits, or helping people drill holes.

Apple’s Music is not that good (and less clients than spotify) but it’s the one I chose just because of being centered around albums and a deterministic interface. Library management is hellish on spotify

> Apple’s Music is not that good…

Like Apple Maps, it's a "sleeper" that continues to get better with time. For anyone curious about where Spotify is still better in 2023, this article is a pretty good summary: https://medium.com/@iamtimbaker/spotify-vs-apple-music-which...

The Spotify UI is so weird. It's like their UI/UX team lives on an island and innovates on their own, without contact with the wider world or best practices.

This is a company that tried to make themselves the epicenter of the podcasting world and has not even (apparently?) attempted to put a decent podcast UI into their client. Right now, I'm browsing around on the "Home" page and I don't see a single podcast anywhere. I don't know how to get them other than to click the "Search" button.

Someone at the top isn't paying attention.

The recommendations never really clicked for me. When I do try to use the webapp I get loads of suggestions I cannot dislike or block at all. Apparently this functionality is no longer available in the webapp. I suppose this is supposed to make me want to run their bloated app or upgrade to premium.

They have a feedback forum where other users are reporting the same problems. The staff politely rationalizes the horrible UX and offers irrelevant boilerplate responses.

Occasionally, the site will tell me that a podcast is not available in "your region". What is my region? Am I the reigning monarch? Do I personally own this country? Or is it that we are all serfs tied to the land which webservices geotarget us to?

The videos never play, but the webapp does interrupt podcasts halfway through to create a paused video UI.

Then there are the typical wrong language content choices being shoveled into my recommendations. No, the UX isn't worthwhile. It does inspire an occasional rant. If I just want to listen to a song, why autoplay something totally unrelated next? And I cannot dislike it? Terrible, very bad to horrible.

Stop using Spotify. They've laid their bad faith bare for all the world to see for years, why keep paying them to piss you off?

Because I'm on android so I'm not going for apple music and their price is still much better and more convenient than pirating music.

I never ever think about cancelling Spotify but I think about cancelling Netflix once a month.

YouTube music is fine (and comes with YouTube premium for free - or the other way around, depending on how you think about it).

I'm sorry that frying pan isn't very comfortable, here, come sit in this fire.

The first thing I do when I open the Spotify app on my iPhone is do a hard close of said app because God forbid I want an up-to-date list of recently updated podcasts. I understand trying to keep things in cache but for things that require frequent updates that should be the default yet there isn't even a swipe down to refresh function.

The podcast ads also break the player like 30% of the time, resulting in another hard close.

In CarPlay occasionally there is an issue where clicking on one podcast episode in new episodes section results in playing the item below it, resulting in another hard close.

The desktop app doesn't have many issues but they did make a change to playlists a couple of months ago where some useless sidebar comes out from the right when you play a song.

I ended up abandoning them for podcasts all together about a month ago.

Too many people working there making changes to things that aren't broken for the sake of making changes. Not a single thing they have done in the last ~4 years has been positive.

I just wish they would stop trying to sell me something I already bought. I don't want to be exposed to all the popups and videos and fees etc that "maximize engagement"

I just want a music library that has everything, good search, and recommendations when I purposely seek them out.

The "Friend Activity" screen is also pretty much non-functioning. We had the ability to see what our friends were listening to in various other apps decades ago (usually via some plugin)

It is incredible how shit all the streaming services are at anything related to interacting with your friends.

Why can’t they make a custom menu of my most used buttons? That would be real user customization, not a reel of my top listened songs. Or better still, let me make my own Player layout.

Today, I find the UI downgrade buries Offline, Playback, Settings, One more layer deeper, behind a circle that has the first letter of my username.

I just canceled my Spotify family account when I realized my kids used it to watch stupid TikTok videos all the time. I mean what is this, why does Spotify even support videos at all? Looking further, I realized that there's apparently no quality control for "podcasts" uploads at all, it's filled with absolute garbage, often hidden as "ASMR" where there are just porn noises and stuff like that.

Moved to Deezer, seems OK so far.

Where can you watch videos? I just checked on the iOS app and couldnt find anything?

Simply search for stuff in Podcasts, for instance https://open.spotify.com/episode/6IFpCggUjo3wlTisJh4w7o

They removed the ability to pin playlist shortcuts to the Android home screen. They did it without any warning or reasoning. On their forums, a number of people express the desire for that feature to be back. That triggered an automatic notification saying " this idea is getting traction someone will take a look at it! ". And yet.

After 9 years of being a paying customer, I switched to youtube music.

Reasoning is probably that they want you to listen to what they want you to listen, not that you want to listen.

This is gonna be a prime example of “enshittification” soon.

Why can’t I re-order the songs in my “Liked” playlist?? Who decides to remove a feature like that?

Oh boy, I'm planning to write something around Reddit testing for mobile app and web app. I'm sick and tired of their testing and horrible dark UX pattern.

* Screen take over to force push notifications so I can view my own notification!!!!!! (Mobile)

* Creating new tabs when tapping on threads (Web)

* Removing notification alert from homepage (Mobile web)

If you want a lesson in dark UX patterns and poor testing...just visit Reddit

Reddit's new UI is a complete trash fire and has reliably been so since day 1. As a developer myself it is very hard for me to call others incompetent because I can definitely feel the pain of serving millions of daily users and working under some idiot product managers especially for a social media app... but even so I have no qualms about calling the reddit dev team as a whole utterly incompetent after botching their web AND android front ends for almost a decade and making mistake after user hostile mistake and not even making the app stable in the process. Reddit good down almost weekly in some form or another and seeing the "you bwoke weddit sowwy" page has been consistent

The thing I hate on the desktop app is the search bar going away on the home display. Now have to click the search icon on the left nav, which shows the search input field at top: in the blank space (right of < > back/forward buttons) where it could have been all along!

I really get fed up with too much misapplied UX research.

A recent update added "audio quality" and "video quality" settings to the contextual menu on individual songs.

This is a setting I set once and never touch again usually but the worst part is they put it above the "Go to song radio" option in the same menu that I use all the time.

Who designs this stuff lol, embarassing.

I've gone back in time.

I hate all of the edge cases for these stupid fucking streaming apps. Just put some mp3s on the phone and listen. Download podcasts via RSS. Full library available over tailscale as needed.

I've almost organically switched to using Youtube Music over Spotify because the android app is such a poor experience and constantly changing for the worse.

Don’t like it, don’t buy it. Spotify has numerous competitors. Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music, Deezer, Pandora, Qobuz and the list goes on and on.

Spotify has the best collection by far. So many artists you can only find there.

Maybe other people listen to way more music than me but I’ve never had this come up for me.

At the very least I’ve been able to find the album on a digital store (“the old fashioned way”) or Bandcamp.

I’ve had a grand total of one album from Japan be steaming-exclusive and I managed to import a CD for like ten bucks and rip it the older fashioned way.

I use Deezer because it was the only option (sans VPN shenanigans) in my country for years, and I only ever have failed to find one song I often watch on YouTube. Maybe my taste is pretty basic though.

This depends on who you listen to. I listen to various sub-genres of EDM and find that Apple Music and Tidal carry almost all of my library. I've had issues where both Spotify and Tidal lose some songs for a few months but mysteriously gain them back.

There's an ever growing list of artists who release everywhere except Spotify too though, including me.

I wouldn't want to give up Spotify Connect across all my devices.

Spotify try not to update my windows client on every restart *Impossible Challenge!!!!*

I'm gonna be the boomer here, and say that I never fully switched to Spotify. Almost 20 years after 2005, and I'm still using mp3s with foobar2000 and Shuttle on my phone.

When I want to listen to something I don't have on my phone, I find it and play it on NewPipe.

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