6 ms·

The problem (or rather value proposition) is that the only thing that matters is the end-user's perceived value, and that's almost always in the form of feature

by judge2020 5y ago

The problem (or rather value proposition) is that the only thing that matters is the end-user's perceived value, and that's almost always in the form of features and stability. Most people don't care that it takes an extra 10-100 milliseconds for the UI to react compared to a native app, especially given they just want to listen to music, which the app does just fine. If people specifically don't like the social features, they'll be mad at the decision to implement those social features instead of 'what they used for the tech stack' since ultimately Spotify could have developed the same features in a native app with just a few extra weeks of sprint, if that.

westoncb 5y ago
The outrage around these supposedly egregious performance issues is more understandable when you consider that developers who spend a lot of time tuning performance in their work would naturally develop a 'selective attention bias,' magnifying the significance of what to others are negligible if not imperceptible differences. Imagine the frustration of someone who, for example, did work on sound insulation for cooling systems: they sit out on a patio for dinner with friends and the sound of an inexpertly designed air conditioner appears to them as intolerably intrusive; meanwhile, no one else at the meal notices until it's pointed out.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  The imperceptible becomes perceptible when you make it noticeably more perceptible. A better point would be to not even show the user what they are missing out on, because then that will be the standard. The danger of the latter is it is very likely your competitor(s) will show it to users anyway. I’d let the guy that tinkers on performance keep tinkering.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    None of the competitors care about making the ui 20ms faster. Apple music just flat out didn't work for me, totally broken for the web version and not even an electron app. Spotify is already better than the alternatives.
  - westoncb 5y ago
    Absolutely. Anyone building on top of performance critical systems should have a healthy bit of gratitude for the engineers who were interested to specialize there. That said, I think it's good to remain as objective as possible about the actual impact of optimizing for performance in different domains. So for instance, the impact of attention paid to performance in the codecs used by a music/video player, or the v8 runtime, or rendering or networking subsystems in e.g. macOS or Chromium is huge. However, should we expect the impact of optimizing to be similar in application-level code for consumer apps? I would argue no (granting that exceptions exist). At this layer the computations are for business and display logic, and calling into highly performant subsystems. Additionally, they are typically 'leaves,' not dependencies of other systems (which would cause their performance choices to ramify). This is not to say consumer apps are able to ignore performance concerns: you can still make garbage that way. But you'd be deep into the region of diminishing returns if you poured as many resources into performance for application-level code on something like Spotify as you did on e.g. codecs it uses or low-level rendering code it depends on. And that's the reason tech like Electron is so often selected by folks whose bottom line is massively affective by their ability to be objective about these issues.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      There's a huge difference in the performance levels you're talking about, which creates a risk of unintentional equivocation. I've written long rants about this in the past, so let me draw a picture instead: codecs, chrome old spotify slack, teams, renderer | current spotify | | | |--v----------v----x----------v--------| FAST | SLOW slow enough to notice during casual use \________/\________/\________/\________/ | | | | overkill | bad UX | | you're just being good UX mean to users (your app should be here)
      - westoncb 5y ago
        A couple things here. First is that this is fundamentally a question of tradeoffs, which means a single axis diagram like this is fundamentally misleading. For instance, we have the conclusion about 'being mean to users' toward the slow end of the scale. But if the tradeoff means the app costs more, or has fewer accessibility or language features, or doesn't run on the user's chosen OS—which is more mean? Second, this topic is contentious not because Spotify is slow but because many readers believe that building on Electron implies your app will be slow and is a basically negligent technology decision, a blight on the field of software engineering, and so on and so on... So, while I agree with your placement of Teams (though not Spotify incidentally), saying that because a couple Electron apps are not optimally snappy in this context reinforces the (imo) mistaken attribution of non-snappiness to Electron: afaict, of the major Electron apps out, there are at least as many that are snappy, and of the ones somewhat lacking in this department there are no native apps with feature parity to compare against (i.e. for Slack or Teams; Spotify otoh, maybe it is really bad for some people—not my experience, and the sample of 1 wouldn't prove much). In any case, I like the diagram and largely agree with its assertions in isolation. Edit: I'd be happy to take a look at one of your longer rants if you want to point me to one. I am genuinely interested in better understanding the situation if I've missed something.
- blub 5y ago
  Judging by the dismissals of performance concerns seen in typical online discussion threads, I'm not sure that developers working on performance tuning in any meaningful way still post online. On the contrary, I have the impression that people snubbing performance while claiming that user satisfaction or business goals are the only things that matter do not care about performance or dare I say technical brilliance at all.
  - westoncb 5y ago
    > I'm not sure that developers working on performance tuning in any meaningful way still post online This is a very confusing comment to me since "cares a lot about performance" is probably one of the most consistent attributes of the HN readership—or they are at least a highly vocal subset of the community. Personally, I respect technical brilliance, but believe it comes in many varieties, of which performance tuning is just one and not on any kind of higher plane.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    In terms of running a business, surely user satisfaction and business goals are much more directly relevant than performance in and of itself, except insofar it contributes to the former? So it's not surprising to me that you'd see a lot of that sentiment on a forum hosted by a startup accelerator, nor that it's what for-profit organizations optimize for. That doesn't mean that people can't also have an appreciation for well-performing or technically brilliant code.
  - yomly 5y ago
    I'm starting to come to the conclusion that performance is much more important than we realise. This thread is about how Spotify seemed like magic in the early days. The original iPhone seemed like magic. Netflix seems like magic in how fast it can stream. Similarly, early google and amazon were always fast. I believe our subconscious values speed as an indication of quality far more than our product owners know how to measure for.
    - dimmke 5y ago
      I can only share my experience. I used Spotify for the first time in 2011. It completely defied what I thought was possible with music streaming. Songs would play immediately. It was faster than iTunes. I believe Spotify is still faster than Apple Music. This was at a time when I had no expectation that my smartphone's internet was fast enough to do much of anything. It was so impressive, that I became a paying customer and have been a paying Spotify customer for 10 years. And Spotify pulls a lot of annoying bullshit. They have a habit of treating their users like shit in various ways - you pay and don't get ads in between songs, but they still spam pop ups and try to direct your behavior in various ways. It feels like their attitude towards you as a user is very much influenced by the "free tier" even if you're a paying customer. Their various app UIs have suffered greatly over the years (current incarnation is mostly tolerable) But the base thing they do - play music faster than any other service is what has kept me. I also don't think it is ethical that Apple can offer a competing service, while forcing Spotify to give up a significant cut of its revenue. I think it should be illegal, so I likely would never pay for Apple Music because of that.
systemvoltage 5y ago
If we followed similar arguments about hardware, we wouldn't have Apple today. The entire premise of Apple's hardware is that it is beautiful, well designed, with attention to details even in places where the user would never interact (motherboard layout and finish). You might be guessing from intuition that 10-100ms latency doesn't matter, but I suspect that it does. You can feel the philsophy of the company when you use their products and they feel wonderful. It's a culmination of attention to detail in every aspect of development. I love Sublime Text precisely because of how fast it is.
- imachine1980_ 5y ago
  trashcan, butterfly keyboard, bending displays, less intuitive user interface in post of similar style whit ios?
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Touche, we need some finest software equivalent of Rolls Royces. Luxury software industry doesn't exist, I wish it did. I'd gladly pay 2x for a piece of software that is well crafted.
    - panda88888 5y ago
      Rolls Royces equivalent software would cost at least 10x if the cost ratio is analogous to the vehicle prices. And they would expect you to have an assistant to work the software for you. ;P
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      Crudely put, luxury market is iOS. A lot more “luxury” apps compared to android, and priced accordingly. e.g. $50 for a todo list app, etc.
legulere 5y ago
The problem is that the people with decision power over software are usually not the ones who actually use it and latency issues are more of a subconscious thing. Slow programs just feel less good to use until they reach a pretty high threshold where it feels unbearable. For speed good enough is just very far away from good (factor 10-1000)
snek_case 5y ago
The Spotify website and phone apps don't just have performance issues, they have awful bugs that have been left unfixed for months/years. When streaming to a Chromecast, the UI quickly gets out of sync, randomly disconnects, etc. I'm resorting to using a bluetooth receiver connected to my amplifier because that works better. The recommendations are also getting worse IMO, though that's more subjective, hard to quantify, but the amount of time I spend using Spotify has gone down a lot, just because I'm not discovering enough interesting tracks anymore. IMO, Spotify is neglecting its core features, and that will ultimately hurt the platform. However, there is such a thing as network effect, and they may have the broadest selection of music. That will keep the platform growing, up to a point. Eventually, the growth numbers may peak and slow down. It's just that there's a lot of inertia right now, and the growth is still going upwards, but eventually, gravity might catch up.
- ouchjars 5y ago
  > The recommendations are also getting worse IMO It seems to me that this happens on a per-user basis as recommendations are overfitted to the recommendations they've already listened to. They overfit so much that if you put a playlist of 1000 tracks you like on shuffle, it will only play the hundred or so tracks the algorithm has decided you "really like", and it will play almost the same selection if you put it on shuffle the next day. YouTube music (music on YouTube, not YouTube Music) works the same way but less subtly. I had a great few months discovering music through their recommendations, until literally every song I listened to would be followed on autoplay by "Sergio Mendes feat. Black Eyed Peas - Mas Que Nada" or "Funky Destination - The Inside Man (Soopasoul remix)".
  - srmarm 5y ago
    During the first lockdown my girlfriend and I would put music videos on youtube on a Friday night. No matter where we started we'd end up funnelled to 'Len - Steal my Sunshine' and then a predictable list of likable but before long thoroughly overplayed songs. It became a bit of an in-joke with us but yeah the youtube recommendation algorithm is dreadful.
jack_pp 5y ago
Spotify's Android app is of very poor quality. Search is just so basic, you can not have any typos whatsoever. There is no proper history function. Say you start a radio, it only remembers that you started a radio but if you come back to it you probably will not have the same songs. Connectivity is piss poor. If you lost connection you will have to restart the app otherwise you won't be able to use search. While this is about the native desktop client, I assume it has similar problems so the argument that it is only a couple milliseconds of latency doesn't hold up. Their UX is the worst I've ever had to deal with in a music app.
- gmassman 5y ago
  It's true. I'm sad to see how far downhill Spotify's UX has slid on all fronts, but especially native. They are also suffering significantly on the customer service end. I asked for a data dump months ago and haven't gotten anything more than an automated "we're working on it" in May.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  You know what’s fascinating, I find these same things so annoying and also use it less because of that… but crucially I still pay for it. So in essence I’m their best customer. I pay and I don’t use it. All streaming platforms operate like gyms, they want the most paying customers who forget they even pay for the service and don’t really use it. I’m guessing someone in Spotify’s marketing dept or user retention came up with an algo that determined the features/bugs that would make the service just bad enough that it’s still usable (and thus worth paying for) but too annoying to use too often.
  - jack_pp 5y ago
    Yeah i still pay for it too even though I mostly use youtube music now which is much better in my opinion. I'll go ahead and cancel it because of this thread.
- jamil7 5y ago
  The iOS client isn’t much better, it seems as if they’ve given up on decent offline support all together.
spoonjim 5y ago
The stability of Spotify is awful, I use Spotify to entertain my kids in the daytime and put them to bed at night so I’m a heavy user. Connecting to external speakers through Connect is very unstable. The thing that keeps me on Spotify is that I’ve invested a lot (but not insane) time in curating my playlists. If I was guaranteed a high quality experience with a competitor I would make the switch but I’m not going to make the switch just to find out that the competitor also sucks.
- bigfudge 5y ago
  Transferring playlists is pretty easy. There’s a web app that connnects to most services and moves tracks between them
specialist 5y ago
Probably. But I'd like to think fit & finish makes an app more sticky.
ipv6ipv4 5y ago
I disagree with the assessment that an extra 10-100ms doesn’t matter. How pleasant an app is to use does affect a user’s perception of an app and product even if they can’t articulate it. Fit, finish and polish do matter.
- laurent92 5y ago
  This. 10ms matters. On my first iPad, gestures seemed to actually move the screen like paper. Now you perform the gesture and the screen does it’s animation. It doesn’t feel alive. And the animation gets in the way, because you need to wait for it.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  Arguing app performance doesn’t matter sounds like extra polish and better fitting parts without gaps or creaks on luxury cars just do not matter. Yes, rusty creaking lambos are the best. The rustier and creakier the better.
blub 5y ago
Generic statements such as "most people don't care [...] extra 10-100ms for the UI" need to be supported by evidence, especially since those 100ms are added to existing latency and 100ms is considered the threshold where operations feel instantaneous [1]. Still, for certain things 100ms is too much. Android famously had a round-trip audio latency of a bit above 100ms which made it a poor choice for music apps - in contrast to iOS. They now require 20ms in the Android Compatibility Definition Document and admit that musicians require 10ms [2]. In addition to that, hitting the 100ms threshold doesn't mean that lag is not noticeable or not annoying. There was an article about keyboard lag posted on HN a while ago, and the top comment was likewise interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486494. [1]: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-... [2]: https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/audio-latency https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/audio-latency
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Yup. 100ms may be working as "instantaneous" in isolation. If you start chaining interactions, it absolutely isn't. Once per 100ms means 10 times per second. A game running at 10FPS would be considered unplayable, not just because of choppy rendering, but also because of input lag.
open-source-ux 5y ago
Users do notice speed issues in apps and websites. The NNGroup has done studies with users to gather reactions to slow websites in 1997 and 2010. They remain relevant in 2021 to both apps and websites: "Users really care about speed in interaction design" [1] A few weeks ago someone on HN shared the reflections of the developer of SumatraPDF - a native Windows PDF reader that is small, lightweight and performant (all the things that Adobe Acrobat Reader is not). From the developer Krzysztof Kowalczyk: "I believe being small and seemingly fast was a big reason for adoption...there will never be a time when users want bloated and slow apps, so being small and fast is a permanent advantage." [2] [1] Website Response Times (2010): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/website-response-times/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/website-response-times/ [2] Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF : https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfce3dc0864/lessons-learned-from-15-years-of-sumatrapdf-an-open-source-windows-app.html https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfc...
jgb1984 5y ago
Myself and every (non-technical) user of Spotify I know complains about the horrible mobile and desktop apps. The android one is an absolute dog, even on mid to high end smartphones. If you neglect your core features in exchange for pointless trinkets you're setting yourself up for failure. The first alternative to show up with an equally vast catalog, but a light and fast interface is going to win a lot of customers in no time. Remember this is streaming: there is no friction for me to switch. I export/import my playlists and it's done.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > The first alternative to show up with an equally vast catalog (...) This is exactly why Spotify can decay so badly and still succeed. This is why most widely-used apps are so bloated and offer such ridiculously bad UX. It's because the whole point of the business behind them is to ensure there will be no alternative. Slack, Teams, Discord, et al. live off network effects. You'll go where the community is. At work, you'll use what your employer picks for you, and your employer has a huge list of concerns[0] that are more important to them than user experience. Spotify survives because of the catalog - making a streaming app is relatively trivial; reproducing all the deals with labels and individual artists is an insurmountable barrier. Netflix was untouchable up until their distribution deals expired, at which point the owners of the content all spun up their own streaming services - but a random entrepreneur can't possibly break into that market. -- [0] - Ranging from "does it tick the right cybersecurity questionnaire checkboxes", through "does it integrate with our SSO", "does it work with our SharePoint", to "was the golfing with the salesperson fun".
  - jgb1984 5y ago
    How many devs do they employ? How big is their cashflow? And still they fail to develop a glorified winamp that's not an exercise in frustration to use? The thing is bloated, slow and riddled with bugs that go years unfixed. Why take the risk of offering such a crap experience, just because you can afford it? Hubris? Incompetence? Both?
    - 5y ago
shp0ngle 5y ago
I mean I have one of the fastest laptops (Apple M1 MacBook Pro) and now I opened Spotify and it was just a black screen for about 1 minute before it showed anything. Then it started. It is usable. But not good.
Shacklz 5y ago
> Most people don't care that it takes an extra 10-100 milliseconds I probably wouldn't care about it too much if they didn't mess up the rest of their apps into the dogturd that they currently are. Doing bad UX is one thing, making UX consistently worse with pretty much every update another. And that's what Spotify has been doing for years now - if I could go back to a client-version from a few years ago, I would, immediately, without thinking twice. The fun part? My company jumped on the SAFe-train a while ago, and Spotify was heralded as the "prime example" of where agile and all that works out really well. I have no idea what they are doing, but whatever it is - if they continue like this, I'll go back to pirating music, because they're getting really close to having just-as-bad of an experience as that. And I really don't mind paying 20 bucks for my family account; experience is all I care about.
southerntofu 5y ago
> Most people don't care that it takes an extra 10-100 milliseconds for the UI TLDR: up to 100ms latency is fine, but alongside higher RAM usage, and when applied to all programs across your machine (not just a single app), hell breaks loose. I entirely agree with this statement. However, most people don't have a high-end machine like the developers test on, and actual difference in latency between an electron app and a web app may be over an order of magnitude larger. The problem is in many parts of the world (including in poorer communities of the global north) people rely on second-hand hardware which even in 2021 typically has 1-4GB of RAM, so a single application taking hundreds of megabytes when not over a gigabyte of RAM will quickly lead to you swap hell and render your entire machine slower. Despite being an ardent GNU/Linux user, I believe the linux kernel OOM is close to the worst that can be done in this matter (although there are certain progresses with eg. earlyoom), but MacOS and Windows are certainly not immune from it. You'd be surprised just how much people avoid using their computer altogether when they don't absolutely need it, just because it's slow as hell, just because developers in their ~ivory towers~ offices didn't do testing on reasonable second-hand hardware.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  I don't understand in which universe 100ms latency is fine. It's an insane amount of time. Hell, when you're used to 140+hz refresh rate, apps that have hardcoded a 60fps GUI refresh loop, so 16ms between two frames, are terribly obvious (and really feel like a pain to use)
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    It's not good, but it's not the worst. Of course i prefer applications which feel instantaneous, but these are hard to come by nowadays. I don't have strong opinions for 140Hz refresh rate, because i don't think i ever had monitors with more than 60Hz. Many modern JS/Electron apps are in fact network bound for UI updates which is the worst possible thing you can do... just try to use element.io in a Tor Browser on a normal xDSL connection and you'll see what i mean (unless it's improved recently). So on this scale of the absurdity of modern software engineering, 100ms latency for user interaction is not all that bad... although my GUI/CLI tools in the 90s were much snappier than that and we have in fact greatly regressed as a field.
nicoburns 5y ago
The problem is it's only 10-100 milliseconds when my computer is otherwise unloaded. When my machine is under high load that turns into several seconds.
ohthehugemanate 5y ago
> the only thing that matters is the end-user's perceived value, and that's almost always in the form of features and stability. I think here it's more accurate to say, "the business' impression of the end-user's perceived value". Because a snappy user experience DOES have real value; in web we are very conscious that milliseconds cost viewers in load and response times. It's well documented that brand positivity is connected to load and response times. But users don't know to tell you that until the performance gets REALLY bad. Consequently it's hard to get this value from a user survey, and hard to communicate internally as a value prop. Capabilities are much more business process friendly.
gsich 5y ago
They do care if they have a comparison.
handrous 5y ago
My wife doesn't know WTF Electron is, but definitely notices when a pile of Electron "apps" are slowing her computer to a crawl.
thesuitonym 5y ago
> Most people don't care that it takes an extra 10-100 milliseconds for the UI to react compared to a native app You can tell this is true because people keep complaining about it, and developers keep reminding us that we don't actually care about how slow apps are.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

westoncb 5y ago

The outrage around these supposedly egregious performance issues is more understandable when you consider that developers who spend a lot of time tuning performance in their work would naturally develop a 'selective attention bias,' magnifying the significance of what to others are negligible if not imperceptible differences. Imagine the frustration of someone who, for example, did work on sound insulation for cooling systems: they sit out on a patio for dinner with friends and the sound of an inexpertly designed air conditioner appears to them as intolerably intrusive; meanwhile, no one else at the meal notices until it's pointed out.

runawaybottle 5y ago
The imperceptible becomes perceptible when you make it noticeably more perceptible. A better point would be to not even show the user what they are missing out on, because then that will be the standard. The danger of the latter is it is very likely your competitor(s) will show it to users anyway. I’d let the guy that tinkers on performance keep tinkering.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  None of the competitors care about making the ui 20ms faster. Apple music just flat out didn't work for me, totally broken for the web version and not even an electron app. Spotify is already better than the alternatives.
- westoncb 5y ago
  Absolutely. Anyone building on top of performance critical systems should have a healthy bit of gratitude for the engineers who were interested to specialize there. That said, I think it's good to remain as objective as possible about the actual impact of optimizing for performance in different domains. So for instance, the impact of attention paid to performance in the codecs used by a music/video player, or the v8 runtime, or rendering or networking subsystems in e.g. macOS or Chromium is huge. However, should we expect the impact of optimizing to be similar in application-level code for consumer apps? I would argue no (granting that exceptions exist). At this layer the computations are for business and display logic, and calling into highly performant subsystems. Additionally, they are typically 'leaves,' not dependencies of other systems (which would cause their performance choices to ramify). This is not to say consumer apps are able to ignore performance concerns: you can still make garbage that way. But you'd be deep into the region of diminishing returns if you poured as many resources into performance for application-level code on something like Spotify as you did on e.g. codecs it uses or low-level rendering code it depends on. And that's the reason tech like Electron is so often selected by folks whose bottom line is massively affective by their ability to be objective about these issues.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    There's a huge difference in the performance levels you're talking about, which creates a risk of unintentional equivocation. I've written long rants about this in the past, so let me draw a picture instead: codecs, chrome old spotify slack, teams, renderer | current spotify | | | |--v----------v----x----------v--------| FAST | SLOW slow enough to notice during casual use \________/\________/\________/\________/ | | | | overkill | bad UX | | you're just being good UX mean to users (your app should be here)
    - westoncb 5y ago
      A couple things here. First is that this is fundamentally a question of tradeoffs, which means a single axis diagram like this is fundamentally misleading. For instance, we have the conclusion about 'being mean to users' toward the slow end of the scale. But if the tradeoff means the app costs more, or has fewer accessibility or language features, or doesn't run on the user's chosen OS—which is more mean? Second, this topic is contentious not because Spotify is slow but because many readers believe that building on Electron implies your app will be slow and is a basically negligent technology decision, a blight on the field of software engineering, and so on and so on... So, while I agree with your placement of Teams (though not Spotify incidentally), saying that because a couple Electron apps are not optimally snappy in this context reinforces the (imo) mistaken attribution of non-snappiness to Electron: afaict, of the major Electron apps out, there are at least as many that are snappy, and of the ones somewhat lacking in this department there are no native apps with feature parity to compare against (i.e. for Slack or Teams; Spotify otoh, maybe it is really bad for some people—not my experience, and the sample of 1 wouldn't prove much). In any case, I like the diagram and largely agree with its assertions in isolation. Edit: I'd be happy to take a look at one of your longer rants if you want to point me to one. I am genuinely interested in better understanding the situation if I've missed something.
blub 5y ago
Judging by the dismissals of performance concerns seen in typical online discussion threads, I'm not sure that developers working on performance tuning in any meaningful way still post online. On the contrary, I have the impression that people snubbing performance while claiming that user satisfaction or business goals are the only things that matter do not care about performance or dare I say technical brilliance at all.
- westoncb 5y ago
  > I'm not sure that developers working on performance tuning in any meaningful way still post online This is a very confusing comment to me since "cares a lot about performance" is probably one of the most consistent attributes of the HN readership—or they are at least a highly vocal subset of the community. Personally, I respect technical brilliance, but believe it comes in many varieties, of which performance tuning is just one and not on any kind of higher plane.
- Cederfjard 5y ago
  In terms of running a business, surely user satisfaction and business goals are much more directly relevant than performance in and of itself, except insofar it contributes to the former? So it's not surprising to me that you'd see a lot of that sentiment on a forum hosted by a startup accelerator, nor that it's what for-profit organizations optimize for. That doesn't mean that people can't also have an appreciation for well-performing or technically brilliant code.
- yomly 5y ago
  I'm starting to come to the conclusion that performance is much more important than we realise. This thread is about how Spotify seemed like magic in the early days. The original iPhone seemed like magic. Netflix seems like magic in how fast it can stream. Similarly, early google and amazon were always fast. I believe our subconscious values speed as an indication of quality far more than our product owners know how to measure for.
  - dimmke 5y ago
    I can only share my experience. I used Spotify for the first time in 2011. It completely defied what I thought was possible with music streaming. Songs would play immediately. It was faster than iTunes. I believe Spotify is still faster than Apple Music. This was at a time when I had no expectation that my smartphone's internet was fast enough to do much of anything. It was so impressive, that I became a paying customer and have been a paying Spotify customer for 10 years. And Spotify pulls a lot of annoying bullshit. They have a habit of treating their users like shit in various ways - you pay and don't get ads in between songs, but they still spam pop ups and try to direct your behavior in various ways. It feels like their attitude towards you as a user is very much influenced by the "free tier" even if you're a paying customer. Their various app UIs have suffered greatly over the years (current incarnation is mostly tolerable) But the base thing they do - play music faster than any other service is what has kept me. I also don't think it is ethical that Apple can offer a competing service, while forcing Spotify to give up a significant cut of its revenue. I think it should be illegal, so I likely would never pay for Apple Music because of that.

systemvoltage 5y ago

If we followed similar arguments about hardware, we wouldn't have Apple today. The entire premise of Apple's hardware is that it is beautiful, well designed, with attention to details even in places where the user would never interact (motherboard layout and finish). You might be guessing from intuition that 10-100ms latency doesn't matter, but I suspect that it does. You can feel the philsophy of the company when you use their products and they feel wonderful. It's a culmination of attention to detail in every aspect of development. I love Sublime Text precisely because of how fast it is.

imachine1980_ 5y ago
trashcan, butterfly keyboard, bending displays, less intuitive user interface in post of similar style whit ios?
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Touche, we need some finest software equivalent of Rolls Royces. Luxury software industry doesn't exist, I wish it did. I'd gladly pay 2x for a piece of software that is well crafted.
  - panda88888 5y ago
    Rolls Royces equivalent software would cost at least 10x if the cost ratio is analogous to the vehicle prices. And they would expect you to have an assistant to work the software for you. ;P
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Crudely put, luxury market is iOS. A lot more “luxury” apps compared to android, and priced accordingly. e.g. $50 for a todo list app, etc.

legulere 5y ago

The problem is that the people with decision power over software are usually not the ones who actually use it and latency issues are more of a subconscious thing. Slow programs just feel less good to use until they reach a pretty high threshold where it feels unbearable. For speed good enough is just very far away from good (factor 10-1000)

snek_case 5y ago

The Spotify website and phone apps don't just have performance issues, they have awful bugs that have been left unfixed for months/years. When streaming to a Chromecast, the UI quickly gets out of sync, randomly disconnects, etc. I'm resorting to using a bluetooth receiver connected to my amplifier because that works better. The recommendations are also getting worse IMO, though that's more subjective, hard to quantify, but the amount of time I spend using Spotify has gone down a lot, just because I'm not discovering enough interesting tracks anymore. IMO, Spotify is neglecting its core features, and that will ultimately hurt the platform. However, there is such a thing as network effect, and they may have the broadest selection of music. That will keep the platform growing, up to a point. Eventually, the growth numbers may peak and slow down. It's just that there's a lot of inertia right now, and the growth is still going upwards, but eventually, gravity might catch up.

ouchjars 5y ago
> The recommendations are also getting worse IMO It seems to me that this happens on a per-user basis as recommendations are overfitted to the recommendations they've already listened to. They overfit so much that if you put a playlist of 1000 tracks you like on shuffle, it will only play the hundred or so tracks the algorithm has decided you "really like", and it will play almost the same selection if you put it on shuffle the next day. YouTube music (music on YouTube, not YouTube Music) works the same way but less subtly. I had a great few months discovering music through their recommendations, until literally every song I listened to would be followed on autoplay by "Sergio Mendes feat. Black Eyed Peas - Mas Que Nada" or "Funky Destination - The Inside Man (Soopasoul remix)".
- srmarm 5y ago
  During the first lockdown my girlfriend and I would put music videos on youtube on a Friday night. No matter where we started we'd end up funnelled to 'Len - Steal my Sunshine' and then a predictable list of likable but before long thoroughly overplayed songs. It became a bit of an in-joke with us but yeah the youtube recommendation algorithm is dreadful.

jack_pp 5y ago

Spotify's Android app is of very poor quality. Search is just so basic, you can not have any typos whatsoever. There is no proper history function. Say you start a radio, it only remembers that you started a radio but if you come back to it you probably will not have the same songs. Connectivity is piss poor. If you lost connection you will have to restart the app otherwise you won't be able to use search. While this is about the native desktop client, I assume it has similar problems so the argument that it is only a couple milliseconds of latency doesn't hold up. Their UX is the worst I've ever had to deal with in a music app.

gmassman 5y ago
It's true. I'm sad to see how far downhill Spotify's UX has slid on all fronts, but especially native. They are also suffering significantly on the customer service end. I asked for a data dump months ago and haven't gotten anything more than an automated "we're working on it" in May.
vxNsr 5y ago
You know what’s fascinating, I find these same things so annoying and also use it less because of that… but crucially I still pay for it. So in essence I’m their best customer. I pay and I don’t use it. All streaming platforms operate like gyms, they want the most paying customers who forget they even pay for the service and don’t really use it. I’m guessing someone in Spotify’s marketing dept or user retention came up with an algo that determined the features/bugs that would make the service just bad enough that it’s still usable (and thus worth paying for) but too annoying to use too often.
- jack_pp 5y ago
  Yeah i still pay for it too even though I mostly use youtube music now which is much better in my opinion. I'll go ahead and cancel it because of this thread.
jamil7 5y ago
The iOS client isn’t much better, it seems as if they’ve given up on decent offline support all together.

spoonjim 5y ago

The stability of Spotify is awful, I use Spotify to entertain my kids in the daytime and put them to bed at night so I’m a heavy user. Connecting to external speakers through Connect is very unstable. The thing that keeps me on Spotify is that I’ve invested a lot (but not insane) time in curating my playlists. If I was guaranteed a high quality experience with a competitor I would make the switch but I’m not going to make the switch just to find out that the competitor also sucks.

bigfudge 5y ago
Transferring playlists is pretty easy. There’s a web app that connnects to most services and moves tracks between them

specialist 5y ago

Probably. But I'd like to think fit & finish makes an app more sticky.

ipv6ipv4 5y ago

I disagree with the assessment that an extra 10-100ms doesn’t matter. How pleasant an app is to use does affect a user’s perception of an app and product even if they can’t articulate it. Fit, finish and polish do matter.

laurent92 5y ago
This. 10ms matters. On my first iPad, gestures seemed to actually move the screen like paper. Now you perform the gesture and the screen does it’s animation. It doesn’t feel alive. And the animation gets in the way, because you need to wait for it.
inter_netuser 5y ago
Arguing app performance doesn’t matter sounds like extra polish and better fitting parts without gaps or creaks on luxury cars just do not matter. Yes, rusty creaking lambos are the best. The rustier and creakier the better.

blub 5y ago

Generic statements such as "most people don't care [...] extra 10-100ms for the UI" need to be supported by evidence, especially since those 100ms are added to existing latency and 100ms is considered the threshold where operations feel instantaneous [1]. Still, for certain things 100ms is too much. Android famously had a round-trip audio latency of a bit above 100ms which made it a poor choice for music apps - in contrast to iOS. They now require 20ms in the Android Compatibility Definition Document and admit that musicians require 10ms [2]. In addition to that, hitting the 100ms threshold doesn't mean that lag is not noticeable or not annoying. There was an article about keyboard lag posted on HN a while ago, and the top comment was likewise interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486494. [1]: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-... [2]: https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/audio-latency https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/audio-latency

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Yup. 100ms may be working as "instantaneous" in isolation. If you start chaining interactions, it absolutely isn't. Once per 100ms means 10 times per second. A game running at 10FPS would be considered unplayable, not just because of choppy rendering, but also because of input lag.

open-source-ux 5y ago

Users do notice speed issues in apps and websites. The NNGroup has done studies with users to gather reactions to slow websites in 1997 and 2010. They remain relevant in 2021 to both apps and websites: "Users really care about speed in interaction design" [1] A few weeks ago someone on HN shared the reflections of the developer of SumatraPDF - a native Windows PDF reader that is small, lightweight and performant (all the things that Adobe Acrobat Reader is not). From the developer Krzysztof Kowalczyk: "I believe being small and seemingly fast was a big reason for adoption...there will never be a time when users want bloated and slow apps, so being small and fast is a permanent advantage." [2] [1] Website Response Times (2010): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/website-response-times/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/website-response-times/ [2] Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF : https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfce3dc0864/lessons-learned-from-15-years-of-sumatrapdf-an-open-source-windows-app.html https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfc...

jgb1984 5y ago

Myself and every (non-technical) user of Spotify I know complains about the horrible mobile and desktop apps. The android one is an absolute dog, even on mid to high end smartphones. If you neglect your core features in exchange for pointless trinkets you're setting yourself up for failure. The first alternative to show up with an equally vast catalog, but a light and fast interface is going to win a lot of customers in no time. Remember this is streaming: there is no friction for me to switch. I export/import my playlists and it's done.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> The first alternative to show up with an equally vast catalog (...) This is exactly why Spotify can decay so badly and still succeed. This is why most widely-used apps are so bloated and offer such ridiculously bad UX. It's because the whole point of the business behind them is to ensure there will be no alternative. Slack, Teams, Discord, et al. live off network effects. You'll go where the community is. At work, you'll use what your employer picks for you, and your employer has a huge list of concerns[0] that are more important to them than user experience. Spotify survives because of the catalog - making a streaming app is relatively trivial; reproducing all the deals with labels and individual artists is an insurmountable barrier. Netflix was untouchable up until their distribution deals expired, at which point the owners of the content all spun up their own streaming services - but a random entrepreneur can't possibly break into that market. -- [0] - Ranging from "does it tick the right cybersecurity questionnaire checkboxes", through "does it integrate with our SSO", "does it work with our SharePoint", to "was the golfing with the salesperson fun".
- jgb1984 5y ago
  How many devs do they employ? How big is their cashflow? And still they fail to develop a glorified winamp that's not an exercise in frustration to use? The thing is bloated, slow and riddled with bugs that go years unfixed. Why take the risk of offering such a crap experience, just because you can afford it? Hubris? Incompetence? Both?
  - 5y ago

shp0ngle 5y ago

I mean I have one of the fastest laptops (Apple M1 MacBook Pro) and now I opened Spotify and it was just a black screen for about 1 minute before it showed anything. Then it started. It is usable. But not good.

Shacklz 5y ago

> Most people don't care that it takes an extra 10-100 milliseconds I probably wouldn't care about it too much if they didn't mess up the rest of their apps into the dogturd that they currently are. Doing bad UX is one thing, making UX consistently worse with pretty much every update another. And that's what Spotify has been doing for years now - if I could go back to a client-version from a few years ago, I would, immediately, without thinking twice. The fun part? My company jumped on the SAFe-train a while ago, and Spotify was heralded as the "prime example" of where agile and all that works out really well. I have no idea what they are doing, but whatever it is - if they continue like this, I'll go back to pirating music, because they're getting really close to having just-as-bad of an experience as that. And I really don't mind paying 20 bucks for my family account; experience is all I care about.

southerntofu 5y ago

> Most people don't care that it takes an extra 10-100 milliseconds for the UI TLDR: up to 100ms latency is fine, but alongside higher RAM usage, and when applied to all programs across your machine (not just a single app), hell breaks loose. I entirely agree with this statement. However, most people don't have a high-end machine like the developers test on, and actual difference in latency between an electron app and a web app may be over an order of magnitude larger. The problem is in many parts of the world (including in poorer communities of the global north) people rely on second-hand hardware which even in 2021 typically has 1-4GB of RAM, so a single application taking hundreds of megabytes when not over a gigabyte of RAM will quickly lead to you swap hell and render your entire machine slower. Despite being an ardent GNU/Linux user, I believe the linux kernel OOM is close to the worst that can be done in this matter (although there are certain progresses with eg. earlyoom), but MacOS and Windows are certainly not immune from it. You'd be surprised just how much people avoid using their computer altogether when they don't absolutely need it, just because it's slow as hell, just because developers in their ~ivory towers~ offices didn't do testing on reasonable second-hand hardware.

jcelerier 5y ago
I don't understand in which universe 100ms latency is fine. It's an insane amount of time. Hell, when you're used to 140+hz refresh rate, apps that have hardcoded a 60fps GUI refresh loop, so 16ms between two frames, are terribly obvious (and really feel like a pain to use)
- southerntofu 5y ago
  It's not good, but it's not the worst. Of course i prefer applications which feel instantaneous, but these are hard to come by nowadays. I don't have strong opinions for 140Hz refresh rate, because i don't think i ever had monitors with more than 60Hz. Many modern JS/Electron apps are in fact network bound for UI updates which is the worst possible thing you can do... just try to use element.io in a Tor Browser on a normal xDSL connection and you'll see what i mean (unless it's improved recently). So on this scale of the absurdity of modern software engineering, 100ms latency for user interaction is not all that bad... although my GUI/CLI tools in the 90s were much snappier than that and we have in fact greatly regressed as a field.

nicoburns 5y ago

The problem is it's only 10-100 milliseconds when my computer is otherwise unloaded. When my machine is under high load that turns into several seconds.

ohthehugemanate 5y ago

> the only thing that matters is the end-user's perceived value, and that's almost always in the form of features and stability. I think here it's more accurate to say, "the business' impression of the end-user's perceived value". Because a snappy user experience DOES have real value; in web we are very conscious that milliseconds cost viewers in load and response times. It's well documented that brand positivity is connected to load and response times. But users don't know to tell you that until the performance gets REALLY bad. Consequently it's hard to get this value from a user survey, and hard to communicate internally as a value prop. Capabilities are much more business process friendly.

gsich 5y ago

They do care if they have a comparison.

handrous 5y ago

My wife doesn't know WTF Electron is, but definitely notices when a pile of Electron "apps" are slowing her computer to a crawl.

thesuitonym 5y ago

> Most people don't care that it takes an extra 10-100 milliseconds for the UI to react compared to a native app You can tell this is true because people keep complaining about it, and developers keep reminding us that we don't actually care about how slow apps are.

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