Hacker News Reader

Comment by plutokras | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. It is nice to have separate apps for Music, Podcasts and audiobooks. You know, do one thing well. Spotfiy tries to do all of these and it's a bloated mess.

View on HN

It's reflective of how the products have changed.

Back in the day, you uploaded all your own media. you didn't have access to hundreds of thousands of streaming options across music, podcasts, and movies. Having a single app to upload your media and sync to your MP3 player was optimal.

Now that everything is streaming, and accessible on mobile without a need to sync to a local source, the benefits of media type unity is much weaker. It's easier to have individual apps that provide access points to each type of media library and optimized for that type of media.

But,

There are still those of us (such as myself) that prefer the local media sourcing, using iPods, etc, and that would love a unified app without any store. Just a window into my personal media library and the ability to sync it to a handheld device. Though the options for handheld devices these days are both slim and expensive...

One thing I miss with the move to mobile and cloud-first is that you used to be able to organize your phone apps on a desktop which I did every 6-12 months to clean them up. I find that's a real pain on an iPhone. I guess I can just remember names and search but I liked a more organized layout over 4 or 5 screens by general category.

That's because they're a bloated SaaS company trying to monetize M4A files.

A music app simply lists what you have available. SaaS bloatware on the other hand constantly changes its UI to maximize engagement and nudge users towards ad-stuffed podcasts, because the music is a loss-leader for them.

“Do one thing well” isn’t the same thing as “make several almost identical copies of a monolith, all wearing different hats”.

I just hope this doesn’t actually come with three times the resource impact of iTunes. As far as I remember from my Windows days, iTunes was enormous and basically supplied half the macOS standard library and frameworks compiled to DLLs with it.

The new apps seem to take more advantage of the open source collaborated cross-platform version of Foundation rewritten in Swift that uses as much of Windows' WinUI and other native libraries as it can get away with (via more direct WinRT/Swift bindings), much thinner than the Objective-C Foundation the old iTunes was built on that used very few Windows native libraries. The apps themselves are still closed source so we don't know for sure, but overall they seem less bloated and more "Windows native" than the old iTunes, while apparently still sharing a lot of Swift code with their Apple platform relatives.

It's a fascinating new version of the old stack that works much better on Windows, if those things are true. At least in my usage so far, the Apple Music and Apple TV apps feel much better on Windows than iTunes ever has.

Unlike Apple, which can have all their apps installed by default on their OS, Spotify doesn’t have such luxury. They’re lucky if users take the time to download and install their one app let alone asking them to install multiple apps.

I’m sure if Spotify had the choice they would split things into separate apps. Having separate apps makes it much easier to deploy changes since you don’t need to coordinate (as much) with other teams for every release.

> They’re lucky if users take the time to download and install their one app let alone asking them to install multiple apps.

In practice, this doesn't appear to be an obstacle. Companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, etc. have many apps in the App Store "Top Charts".

If anything, this would be a smart marketing strategy if Spotify could (for example) make a compelling standalone "podcast" app, because it would allow them to double or triple their footprint on App Store charts.

I doubt anybody would care about Spotify putting everything in one app if podcasts, etc were just sidebar items, especially if there were settings to hide them, but the issue is that they’ve intentionally made these things hard to avoid. There’s no way to signal to the Spotify app that you care only about music and will never be interested in other Spotify offerings.

As opposed to just ... a tab in iTunes? There's a lot to hate about iTunes historically, but having the useful stuff in one place was not the thing to hate, and the additional value each app brings is almost nothing, whereas the clutter they bring is real.

It's good to be able to focus on things, but this is way too categorized and just drives even more clutter.

Except that the apps that replaced iTunes are all awful (at least on macOS).

To be fair iTunes wasn't that great either, it was mostly a necessity to use iPhone (Update etc). Personally I haven't used any of these apps since it became possible to perform backups and updates without a computer.

nah, iTunes was wonderful when I maintained my own music collection.

Do one thing well? If only! The Music app is a complete and utter disaster compared to its previous iTunes implementations.

All are just...audio files.

> All are just...audio files.

I think that's overly reductive.

They have different kinds of metadata, distribution mechanisms, and ideal UIs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com