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Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

• npteljes 4y ago
  >Is there any technical/legal limit for Apple to avoid doing this? There isn't, they just don't have to try that hard, because of the myriad of other reasons people continue to pay Apple.
• taspeotis 4y ago
  If you have not already, you can ask for it: https://www.apple.com/feedback/apple-music.html https://www.apple.com/feedback/apple-music.html It seems other people have asked for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/qeb883/continuity_feature_on_apple_music_apple_please/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/qeb883/continui...
• Smoosh 4y ago
  They sort of do have it. You can be playing music on your phone and "tap it" onto a HomePod. It also works the other way, I can ask Siri on the HomePod to play something, and the details will show on my iPhone & iPad. I don't know if there is a way to go from iPhone to computer. EDIT: That may not qualify as a "handoff" though. But it does handoff from current device to AirPods when you put them in, so there's that.
  • lstamour 4y ago
    Documented at https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/homepod/apdfb81a72e4/homepod https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/homepod/apdfb81a72e4/h... I was going to stop by to post about the feature, documented on the above page, under “Play audio on a HomePod using Control Center” If it showed up anywhere in future, it would be there, I think, in the list of AirPlay devices. I can say I’ve had the opposite problem, where I’m on Spotify on one device and, while playing, would want to use a second device to preview tracks. But the Spotify model only lets you play in one location at a time. I do like the Spotify model most of the time, though.
  • locusofself 4y ago
    The feature to handoff to your homepod, at least on the classic homepods that I have, sucks. It's very slow and unreliable.
    • cjdoc29 4y ago
      It's much better on the HomePod Mini, and I think it must have to do with the U1 chip that can detect proximity. My OG Homepod is frustrating to try to use Handoff on.
    • CSSer 4y ago
      Everything about the HomePods seem to be. I once asked what time it was and due to wifi problems it gave me some generic error message. It baffled me that this thing has to phone home for the time.
• purpleblue 4y ago
  The Apple Music app is terrible, one of the worst on the market. I hate it, it is so clunky and borderline unusable.
  • nielsbot 4y ago
    Which part? This isn't my experience at all...
    • semireg 4y ago
      Almost the entire thing. How about keyboards having an integrated pause play button but it only works for Apple Music if it’s the last responder in handling the event. On YouTube? Hijacked. Incoming phone call and you want to pause music? Nope, your Mac ANSWERS THE PHONE! I was finally fed up and installed a 3rd party app that forces pause play to only hit Apple Music. I use my MBP through a USB-C dock with an external SSD attached and whenever Time Machine or CCC triggers a backup my audio starts skipping. Sure, that isn’t Apple Music’s fault, but it’s part of the ecosystem and that kind of performance should be considered when designing the system. And then the UI. All web views with click delay. I like exploring jazz and electronic genres but navigating and scrolling to start one sub-genre takes like 30 seconds. There’s no way to pin genres that you like or hide genres you don’t care about. I feel like my collection of music from 2000s is gone, even though it was uploaded to the cloud or something … through some apple program 10 years ago. I still have the metadata of my collection but even that is just a facade.
      • kochikame 4y ago
        Maybe it's generational because I seem to be around the same age as you and I also hated the way my music collection "disappeared" into Apple Music (and a whole host of other things I disliked, chief of which that it keeps giving options for things you almost never want or need while at the same time it's hard to just, y'know, find and play and tag the music you want)
      • SkyPuncher 4y ago
        Ugh, that dives me crazy - but it's not an Apple Music issue. It's a MBP issue.
• rizky05 4y ago
  [dead]
• CSSer 4y ago
  I’m going to be glued to this thread because I desperately want this. If you ask me, a lack of features like this is the #1 failure of the Apple ecosystem. I’d even go so far as to call it a kind of big, indirect lie. Why own a ton of Apple devices if you can’t seamlessly and easily control things on whatever Apple device is nearest? For years I feel like I was told as long as I carefully and meticulously shelled out the dough to make every device I can Apple branded I’d experience a kind of integrated device nirvana and it has proved to be almost entirely false. The killer feature that sold me on beginning to invest in the first place was the astounding seamlessness of messages across macOS and iOS. Yet I’ve seen little progress beyond this. It’s embarrassing. I should be able to control and start playing music on my Apple watch on any Apple device from any Apple device, whether that be a HomePod (mini), iPhone, or Apple TV. Yet this isn’t possible. Bluetooth used to be just as, if not more, seamless, and it was more performant. I can’t believe I’m saying that. Even the error messages are comical. Attempts to do this in certain scenarios will overtly claim multiple people are trying to play music and attempt to coerce me to upgrade my plan so that multiple people can play music on multiple devices at the same time. I’m single and live alone. I just want to easily play music everywhere in my apartment, easily transfer music from my TV to my bathroom speaker without losing my place in the playlist or podcast, or change what’s playing using my Apple Watch because I decided that I’d like to hear something different emanating from the other room without getting up to find my phone. I’ll cut this short before it becomes a screed, but I’ll close with this. I just asked Siri to play music on one of my HomePod Minis to verify my claim about being unable to control devices by saying the simple phrase, “Hey Siri, play music.” And the response I got was, “Sorry, [name]. Something went wrong and I couldn’t resume.” So I said, “Hey Siri, play music from Apple Music” and she immediately started playing “a station I might like”. This whole system is broken.
  • edmundsauto 4y ago
    And it seems to be decomposing in front of us. I asked my Amazon device to play the Beatles from Spotify. The response was “I could not find a band called the Beatles”. Of course, when I dropped the “from Spotify”, there was an app that only played the Beatles. With ads.
  • a_bonobo 4y ago
• mygrant 4y ago
  That's funny, because the video for Apple's new HomePod (announced yesterday) includes a very specific handoff example: https://youtu.be/oMf_i1YBuMk?t=74 https://youtu.be/oMf_i1YBuMk?t=74 (I don't use Apple Music or a HomePod, so no idea if this is new)
• tommica 4y ago
  Should be a setting - some people might have a playlist for driving and one for working
• jsz0 4y ago
  I feel like at this point adding more continuity features would just be drawing attention to the fact they rarely work correctly and are poorly/confusingly implemented in a variety of ways. Maybe I have exceptionally bad results and they work fine for everyone else but my general sense is Apple quiet quits features they know are a dumpster fire.
• jonathanlydall 4y ago
  It's not even just continuity between devices that it lacks, most times when I plug my iPhone into my car's USB port, it always starts playing the library at track 0 (alphabetically). Normally I could avoid this if I open the Music app before plugging it in, but it would not always work. So one of my favourite things about Spotify is that this doesn't happen. However, unless I have the Music app still installed on the iPhone, the car's entertainment system doesn't show what's playing with Spotify and most times when I plug it in it plays from the Music app instead of Spotify and I have to switch apps. So I installed the Music app again and sync'd a single "silent" track with an exclamation icon album art and a track title saying "Switch Apps". It's really annoying that when I had to buy a new car in 2019 after my old one was written off, that Apple CarPlay wasn't available in Hondas in South Africa except in Civics and CRVs or better, even though in other countries it was. I'd been holding off buying a new car until CarPlay was available and been telling the sales reps as much each time I'd look while dropping my car off for a service.
  • nostromo 4y ago
    This is actually a problem with your car. Some cars will issue a play audio command immediately upon connection. If no songs are in your iPhone's music queue, it will dutifully start from the top. Most newer cars won't do this, and you may be able to shut it off in your car's settings somewhere.
    • jonathanlydall 4y ago
      Except that if I open the Music app prior to plugging it in, then I almost always don't have this problem. The issue tends to occur only when iOS has closed the Music app at some point to free up resources. It seems like my car instantly presses "Play" when plugged in, if the Music app was already loaded, then it continues where it left off, but if the Music app wasn't loaded, then iOS loads the music app but instead of making the iPod interface wait until it's loaded where I left off, it instead plays the default list of everything in your library alphabetically. It feels like a kind of race condition which was just never considered by Apple. Then consider the problems with Spotify. If it was recently playing and I plug it in, then the radio uses Spotify, otherwise it uses the Music app and I need to switch to Spotify on the phone. If the Music app is uninstalled completely, then the iPod interface doesn't work properly, it doesn't show track names or the artwork. It seems highly unlikely to me that Spotify is using the wrong iOS APIs, so I expect the blame here also most lies with Apple. I acknowledge that other cars may not have this problem, but I can't see why Apple couldn't make their software more robust here. Anyway, this is also why I stated my annoyance at the not having the option of CarPlay since it delegates more control to my iPhone, meaning I get innovation and bug fixes on the screen my car on Apple's timelines as opposed to "when I get a new car", and even then, the car companies have far fewer software development resources so can't possibly hope to keep up with the likes of Apple.
• nightpool 4y ago
  I have the same question about YouTube Music—it's actually at the point now where YouTube proper does handoff better then the music app does, but Spotify is still way ahead of any other company in this area, including seamless handoff and using your laptop/phone as a remote control for a desktop or a different phone. I think most people just don't have multiple devices tbh, so companies don't see it as worth it to invest in multiple device coordination features. I wonder what the Spotify usage stats are.
  • RHSman2 4y ago
    Spotify have one job. Razor focus
• stev-0 4y ago
  I don’t think spotify does this particularly well.. I moved over last month and this isn’t the main feature I am missing. The feature I miss most is the weekly playlist followed closely by the multiple daily’s.
• malthaus 4y ago
  Apple isn't even able or willing to sync notification status on their apps between my iOS devices. You get a few mails? All lockscreens will show the popups until i manually remove them from every single device, ridiculous.
• paldepind2 4y ago
  Since no one has actually attempted to answer your question yet I'll give my guess as to why: I think Apple generally invested way too little time and developer talent into the development of Apple Music. I think this is evident in many ways when you look at the Music apps, _especially_ the macOS one. Since the initial release of Apple Music very little has happened to the apps, leading me to the conclusion that they're not spending time to improve them either. Recall that Apple bought Beats to acquire the music streaming platform that Beats was developing with the purpose of turning it into Apple Music. To me this always seemed like a bit of a weird move since Apple could obviously build their own music streaming service without acquiring a company to do so. My guess is that someone at Apple who's more of a business person than a product person wanted Apple to have a Spotify competitor ASAP and saw the acquisition of Beats as a quick way to get there (with means that a business person can carry out: acquisitions). The acquisition happened, Beat's tech was turned into Apple Music (probably with time to market as the key metric that management cared about), Apple Music was released. Then the business person was happy, called it a day, and moved on. Had Apple put their own focus and top talent into Apple Music the way they did with iTunes and iTunes Store back when iPod was their main cash cow, then I think Apple Music would have been very different. But alas, "music streaming" is probably just a check mark in someones list of services that Apple should have, and it's already checked so the job is done :)
• alex0110010 4y ago
  I think it is for the following reason: They don't have a concept yet. Spotify Continuity, or however it is called, is wonderful for 3 devices and less. But add more devices and it will get frustrating. What if I want to listen to multiple song on different devices (family setups)? Spotify makes it awful, actually this is one of the main reason I left Spotify. Whenever I left the living room and wanted to play my music on my Mac, the lining room would stop and the people in the living room had to start the music from one of their accounts. This is awful and annoying. Sure, as a single, this wouldn't bother. But most people are not single. So, I think it is due to a missing concept. The HomePod transfer feature was supposed to close the gab a little, but this needs more work. So maybe in the future a switch stream to device button will come, but until then, I will ask Siri to do it for me, Siri transfer to [room name]. Just wish this would work on my iPhone, iPad and Mac as well.
• temp2022account 4y ago
  Is iTunes completely dead now? I remember when that switched, I had a ton of music but made the early investment to never touch the new Music app because the icon color sucked. I'm guessing internally a project called "Music" attracts little talent and apple considers it a good place for new employees to grow, yielding mediocre results. To this day I use Vox for music I care about and SiriusXM in the car (avoiding the phone entirely) for music I don't care about.