One of Spotify's biggest problems is their terrible UI, lacking even the basic functionality. I don't understand how they haven't been able do the bare minimum for 15 years now.
(Suppose I should think of dialing back my Spotify hate a little now that apparently in the renewal they're no longer keeping Rogan as Spotify-exclusive)
Music is usually considered art and you are a boring downer of you complain about artists political or personal controversies. That is another thing. And the artist always have the benefit of doubt of the protagonist in the song not being the artist himself.
My point was more the GP wanted to see Spotify go out of business because they bought a podcast. I just thought it was a bit of a wild statement to make.
BTW, I agree about the Spotify UI. I never liked it and was a GPM user until they destroyed it by pushing me to YTM. Now I use AM, since if I'm going to tolerate a poor UI it might as well work well with all my devices.
I’ve also tried on my Mac, slightly more presses (four, to be exact) as I had to press ‘podcasts & shows’ to refine the search slightly more.
I don’t see how that’s hard to use. Each to their own though I guess, I’ve not seen how difficult it is your side so can’t really comment.
For podcasts, I think people who are big into podcasts are also particular about their player. I know I am. For me, there's space for a music app and a podcast app. They are both audio, but otherwise very different.
Its amazing how so many apps really struggle at the edges. For a company as big as Spotify they should do better. Its probably a side effect of their company's culture.
- You can't turn your queue into a playlist (and you can't see previous queue as part of the queue, only as limited history.)
- Clicking a song or album sometimes clears your queue and starts playing that instead (I know there is a logic to it, but a mistake or mis-click is easy).
- There is no shortcut to add to queue, just long press then find the menu item.
It's possible everyone else is only listening to albums or curating playlists then playing them, but I like to pick things as I go like a jukebox and it sucks at it.
There is, just swipe the song to the right.
meaning that, if you have a bad internet connection and tap on eg an album, it'll open the view for that album and you just have to look at the progress indicator for in some cases up to 20+ seconds, even if you have downloaded that album and all the info is there in the local cache.
this happens annoyingly often, e.g. when leaving an area where you're connected to wifi and your phone hasn't yet switched over to celluar data.
But imagine my surprise when I checked Spotify a couple of years later and the situation was still the same. Ok, I thought, they must have had different internal priorities, but once they get those, they will make UI at least semi-usable.
A few years passed, but the answer was still no. Once again I didn't write because clearly they must have had thousands of actual users writing and demanding the essentials and those things MUST be on their way, no way they weren't!
Several years later and the situation was still the same... This is when I stopped making excuses for the developers. They must be technically incompetent, be dim product-management wise (not understanding features, people, customers, lacking a vision, not to know how to collect, analyze and work on feedback) or stupid/unmotivated. But probably everything of the above.
I only criticize the technical aspects, not the business side. And I don't even criticize a much more challenging podcast/video side of things. I am merely talking about the lack of essentials in the basic music player. They couldn't even do that! I can bet money that the podcast implementation is on no better level. Other people's comments support that assumption. I am not surprised in the least.