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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.