8 ms·

Dear Spotify, stop treating your users like testers

75 points by ananddtyagi 3y ago

flipdot 3y ago
The other day they randomly changed the “Like” button for an “Add to Playlist” one. Though they did communicate that change pretty clearly (there was a popup notifying the user about this behaviour etc.), I think it was a horrible spontaneous decision. I’m glad they reverted the thing the same day it was rolled out. Why doesn’t Spotify add an opt-in for experimental features/updates or distribute an “experimental” version of the app through app stores?
- gwill 3y ago
  and the like/add button doesn't have consistent placement or action. on some screens it still behaves as a like button and sometimes it's on the left. i had muscle memory to tap it and found i was disliking songs i wanted to like.
- kredd 3y ago
  Opt-in experiments carry a huge bias, which is hard to extrapolate to the general user base. As annoying as changes Spotify can be, at least it’s highly unlikely to be used for “important stuff” like emails or general business stuff. Easier to justify small annoyances.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Incentive folks to be part of the experiment via discounts
- scubazealous 3y ago
  I liked the new add to playlist feature, at least on my iphone. I press it once to like the song and double press it to add to a playlist using a checkbox on a menu, and I can choose to take the song out of my liked playlist on that menu. This eliminated a few clicks and is easier while driving. Intuitive and easy to use once I recognized what they did.
- fellerts 3y ago
  The like button disappeared for me a while ago and was replaced by a ⊕ that adds it to the "liked songs" playlist. Are you saying your app still shows the heart button to like a song? Or are you talking about the thumbs-up button that was also removed at some point?
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
10+ years and still no light theme for people with astigmatism who may prefer that yet they seem to re-arrange the UI layout every few months for no discernable benefit
- cryne 3y ago
  You can use https://github.com/spicetify https://github.com/spicetify to customize the appearance
  - 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
    thanks
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  > for no discernible benefit They notice that majority of the users spend more time listening to the 'automation' of growing your playlists, auto-play similar songs in the end of your songs, etc. So maybe their changes anger you, me, and a few others, the majority absorbs them without a thought.
- morkalork 3y ago
  Getting my eyes tested for the first time and finding out I have astigmatism in one eye was eye opening (sorry). When blue LED panels started showing up in appliances everywhere I didn't understand why they were so popular. At night, I couldn't read the time on the microwave oven from across the room because it was so bright and smeared compared to red/amber lights. Now I realize it's just me..
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    We're not rare! Around ⅓ of the U.S. population has astigmatism.
  - fellerts 3y ago
    You can work around this issue by curling your index finger tightly so it forms a tiny hole near the 2nd knuckle and looking through that. What you've got now is a makeshift pinhole camera that should fix any "smearing". It'll also help you see clearly at a distance without glasses!
HenryBemis 3y ago
I dislike the fact that on the changes on the Google Play Store, instead of listing the key changes, they have the boilerplate BS "we work to enhance...". As a good practice, and having suffered from the stupid (and dick-ish imho) changes, I do not update their app, and I have my NoRootFirewall blocking plenty of their garbage IPs. This doesn't let me see my "annual lists" but I don't mind that a bit. Zero value vs some privacy.. I pick privacy every time.
shmde 3y ago
Spotify try not to update my windows client on every restart *Impossible Challenge!!!!*
gadders 3y ago
They honestly can't write an Andoid app to save their life. "Hey! Here's a notification for a new podcast! Want to click on it and see the episode details? Fuck you, here is the Spotify home screen instead." "Yeah, you know those 278 songs you have stored locally? I'm going to re-download the whole lot just because I feel like it." "Oh, you've clicked on a link to a playlist? Extra fuck you, here's the Spotify home screen, search for it yourself." "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." //edit// Sorry - forgot one "I see you want to play some music you have downloaded when you're in a bad network area. Sucks to be you, I'm going to spend 5 minutes auditing all your cellular and wifi connectivity before I can be bothered to draw the screen or show you a song list." //end of edit// Honestly, it's a complete clown show and the only thing going for it is the licensing of so much music.
- junon 3y ago
  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.
  - kyleee 3y ago
    What do we think the average comp of the people implementing all this awfulness? 200k?
- Jenk 3y ago
  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.
saos 3y ago
Oh boy, I'm planning to write something around Reddit testing for mobile app and web app. I'm sick and tired of their testing and horrible dark UX pattern. * Screen take over to force push notifications so I can view my own notification!!!!!! (Mobile) * Creating new tabs when tapping on threads (Web) * Removing notification alert from homepage (Mobile web) If you want a lesson in dark UX patterns and poor testing...just visit Reddit
- aniforprez 3y ago
  Reddit's new UI is a complete trash fire and has reliably been so since day 1. As a developer myself it is very hard for me to call others incompetent because I can definitely feel the pain of serving millions of daily users and working under some idiot product managers especially for a social media app... but even so I have no qualms about calling the reddit dev team as a whole utterly incompetent after botching their web AND android front ends for almost a decade and making mistake after user hostile mistake and not even making the app stable in the process. Reddit good down almost weekly in some form or another and seeing the "you bwoke weddit sowwy" page has been consistent
cik 3y ago
Spotify is something that I'll pay for, forever - even in my grave. The thing is it's an absolutely horrible service, with a rubbish application, amazingly across all platforms. But their catalogue is incredible. I keep trying to use alternatives, and they're not even close - especially when you listen to music in multiple non English geographies and languages. Their cross-language algorithmic suggestions have also been (shockingly) on point, and improving. But lord, their applications are beyond horrible.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  I've been trying youtube music. It's fine. The main annoyance is everyone uses spotify so sharing playlists is just impossible. Not sure about their non-english offerings.
  - stronglikedan 3y ago
    My main annoyance is the amount of music missing from YT Music, especially parts of albums, but I still use it because it comes with my YT premium account. It's like, oh cool, they have this album! Oh crap, they only have a couple of songs from it. And don't even get me started on not skipping songs that I've thumbed down in a playlist, or not being able to like artists because it mucks up my YT video subscriptions. But despite all that, it's still my primary because the recommendation engine is leaps ahead of Spotify.
- xoac 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - fullshark 3y ago
    The attitude is mine, I"ve been a spotify subscriber for almost a decade now, and it's the corpus of music that keeps me there, not the apps/interface and certainly not the exclusive podcasts. Spotify knows this, and also knows they only license the corpus and get squeezed on it so they do these experiments to try and find some way to get users to pay for something they actually own (recommendation engine, exclusive podcasts etc) and as a user it's just endlessly annoying.
skydhash 3y ago
Apple’s Music is not that good (and less clients than spotify) but it’s the one I chose just because of being centered around albums and a deterministic interface. Library management is hellish on spotify
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Apple’s Music is not that good… Like Apple Maps, it's a "sleeper" that continues to get better with time. For anyone curious about where Spotify is still better in 2023, this article is a pretty good summary: https://medium.com/@iamtimbaker/spotify-vs-apple-music-which-is-better-7b1aecb23039 https://medium.com/@iamtimbaker/spotify-vs-apple-music-which...
id00 3y ago
Every time I open their ios app I don't know what to expect. Often features that I so used to just stop working: they broke enqueue songs a few times, local music, sorting within playlists - all basic features. And I don't even want to mention their persistance to show me podcasts (and now audiobooks) without an ability to get rid of them. In the app that most of their users solely use for music. Spotify is doing its best to follow enshittification playbook.
badcppdev 3y ago
I almost posted on HN the other day about the annoying podcast UX in Spotify. The Home > Podcast section on the Android app shows the most recent 8 podcasts you've listened to. If you follow more than 8 podcasts then you need to use the 'Your library' section to check if the other podcasts have new episodes. Spotify will randomly choose new podcasts rather that play you new episodes of podcasts you are already following. Edit: And the fact that I can't get a history of what I've played drives me up the wall. Podcasts and songs.
RugnirViking 3y ago
They seem to have a habit of making things worse every time they make a change, I wish they would just stop trying. I suppose they have the VC curse so a merely profitable buisness isnt enough they must constantly be spewing out new ideas in the hopes of prolonging the exponential curve a little bit longer. The one that annoys me the most isn in fact that when I open the app I get some popup in my face about something. I only ever open the app with a mind to already doing something, so I always flick it away, then some time later sometimes regret it because I would actually like to see whats new and can't find a list of them anywhere, like some labyrinthine music menu stack
- eddmakesio 3y ago
  Spotify is a public company!
  - doctaj 3y ago
    Even worse, then?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > They seem to have a habit of making things worse every time they make a change, I wish they would just stop trying. It's an industry-wide problem. At some point the software is good enough, and should be considered "done". But there's still a development team sitting around--what should they do?? Developers gotta develop, so they'll just keep changing it forever. I remember hearing the saying "Programmers are like beavers. Leave a beaver alone to decide what to do and they'll just keep building dams, regardless of the fact that their home is done." I don't know if that's really true about beavers, but it's true about software organizations. The whole software development team will just continue working on the software even long past the point where they're done.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    I don't know if thats the entire thing though. There are thousands of annoyances and bugs a team could be spending their time fixing to really make the product great. It's not like its "done", in fact its going in the wrong direction. It's more of the "feature factory" mentality imo, a culture of throwing stuff out the door as fast as possible without regard for quality. Its reflective of poor internal incentives and culture.
dangus 3y ago
Don’t like it, don’t buy it. Spotify has numerous competitors. Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music, Deezer, Pandora, Qobuz and the list goes on and on.
- maleldil 3y ago
  Spotify has the best collection by far. So many artists you can only find there.
  - drcongo 3y ago
    There's an ever growing list of artists who release everywhere except Spotify too though, including me.
  - dangus 3y ago
    Maybe other people listen to way more music than me but I’ve never had this come up for me. At the very least I’ve been able to find the album on a digital store (“the old fashioned way”) or Bandcamp. I’ve had a grand total of one album from Japan be steaming-exclusive and I managed to import a CD for like ten bucks and rip it the older fashioned way.
  - redserk 3y ago
    This depends on who you listen to. I listen to various sub-genres of EDM and find that Apple Music and Tidal carry almost all of my library. I've had issues where both Spotify and Tidal lose some songs for a few months but mysteriously gain them back.
  - abenga 3y ago
    I use Deezer because it was the only option (sans VPN shenanigans) in my country for years, and I only ever have failed to find one song I often watch on YouTube. Maybe my taste is pretty basic though.
- aworks 3y ago
  I wouldn't want to give up Spotify Connect across all my devices.
ecmascript 3y ago
The thing is that they perfected some of the app a long time ago but since they employ so many engineers they need to keep changing stuff even things that obviously was better before. I think we have a term for that and it is over-engineering
- lancesells 3y ago
  I think the term is being human. There's probably a subset of employees that are motivated by doing something positive and new at their job which takes up a good portion of their life. It's fun to create things. You see it in other apps as well. Things like the new Slack changes where I've yet to hear of anyone who asked for or liked them. What would be better is if companies gave that need to create a better outlet than changing things for 100s of millions of people.
dbsmith83 3y ago
The "Friend Activity" screen is also pretty much non-functioning. We had the ability to see what our friends were listening to in various other apps decades ago (usually via some plugin)
- xoac 3y ago
  It is incredible how shit all the streaming services are at anything related to interacting with your friends.
drcongo 3y ago
Stop using Spotify. They've laid their bad faith bare for all the world to see for years, why keep paying them to piss you off?
- WXLCKNO 3y ago
  Because I'm on android so I'm not going for apple music and their price is still much better and more convenient than pirating music. I never ever think about cancelling Spotify but I think about cancelling Netflix once a month.
  - doctaj 3y ago
    YouTube music is fine (and comes with YouTube premium for free - or the other way around, depending on how you think about it).
    - drcongo 3y ago
      I'm sorry that frying pan isn't very comfortable, here, come sit in this fire.
jordanpg 3y ago
The Spotify UI is so weird. It's like their UI/UX team lives on an island and innovates on their own, without contact with the wider world or best practices. This is a company that tried to make themselves the epicenter of the podcasting world and has not even (apparently?) attempted to put a decent podcast UI into their client. Right now, I'm browsing around on the "Home" page and I don't see a single podcast anywhere. I don't know how to get them other than to click the "Search" button. Someone at the top isn't paying attention.
WXLCKNO 3y ago
A recent update added "audio quality" and "video quality" settings to the contextual menu on individual songs. This is a setting I set once and never touch again usually but the worst part is they put it above the "Go to song radio" option in the same menu that I use all the time. Who designs this stuff lol, embarassing.
palmfacehn 3y ago
The recommendations never really clicked for me. When I do try to use the webapp I get loads of suggestions I cannot dislike or block at all. Apparently this functionality is no longer available in the webapp. I suppose this is supposed to make me want to run their bloated app or upgrade to premium. They have a feedback forum where other users are reporting the same problems. The staff politely rationalizes the horrible UX and offers irrelevant boilerplate responses. Occasionally, the site will tell me that a podcast is not available in "your region". What is my region? Am I the reigning monarch? Do I personally own this country? Or is it that we are all serfs tied to the land which webservices geotarget us to? The videos never play, but the webapp does interrupt podcasts halfway through to create a paused video UI. Then there are the typical wrong language content choices being shoveled into my recommendations. No, the UX isn't worthwhile. It does inspire an occasional rant. If I just want to listen to a song, why autoplay something totally unrelated next? And I cannot dislike it? Terrible, very bad to horrible.
hbn 3y ago
It's bizarre that article opens using Google as a GOOD example of how to treat users because they practically invented the "users are perpetual beta testers and we will never release a complete/stable product" method of software design/releases. It's what finally pushed me off Android after a decade, and 3 years into my iPhone move, I haven't stopped appreciating feeling respected as a user relative to being in the Google ecosystem. I mean, Apple isn't perfect, but generally redesigns or changes will be announced by a real human at one of their big yearly events. And they seem to be pretty picky about doing that type of thing. Google services are redesigned, shuttered, re-launched, rebranded, etc on a regular basis. Every new Android update the quick settings are completely redesigned, the settings app is completely redesigned, your messaging app would get redesigns from a Play Store update out of nowhere. Sometimes not even from the Play Store, they started getting into using server-side flags to enable UI redesigns so you open the app one day and it's completely redesigned, open it again the next and it's back to how it was before. Meanwhile I open Messages on my iPhone and it looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed at the iPhone reveal in 2007. And the Settings app looks and behaves pretty much like it did on launch too. Google's approach seems to have become the default among many software companies over the past decade. I really hope people start to catch on with how much of a negative reputation it's gotten them these days and that methodology gets shed.
- ananddtyagi 3y ago
  That's fair. I've been using Android for the past 10 years after originally using iPhones, and I definitely agree that it's frustrating how much each OS update changes the UI. I'm actually considering switching back after seeing Apple's more recent OS design updates. I find Google's updates on apps like docs and their work suite are a little more navigable than the Spotify desktop app UI changes, but that's definitely not the case for all their products. It's a good point that they did basically setup the idea of users being "perpetual beta testers". Nice insight!
tacker2000 3y ago
This is gonna be a prime example of “enshittification” soon. Why can’t I re-order the songs in my “Liked” playlist?? Who decides to remove a feature like that?
RiOuseR 3y ago
[dead]
unethical_ban 3y ago
They removed the ability to pin playlist shortcuts to the Android home screen. They did it without any warning or reasoning. On their forums, a number of people express the desire for that feature to be back. That triggered an automatic notification saying " this idea is getting traction someone will take a look at it! ". And yet. After 9 years of being a paying customer, I switched to youtube music.
- theragra 3y ago
  Reasoning is probably that they want you to listen to what they want you to listen, not that you want to listen.
internet101010 3y ago
The first thing I do when I open the Spotify app on my iPhone is do a hard close of said app because God forbid I want an up-to-date list of recently updated podcasts. I understand trying to keep things in cache but for things that require frequent updates that should be the default yet there isn't even a swipe down to refresh function. The podcast ads also break the player like 30% of the time, resulting in another hard close. In CarPlay occasionally there is an issue where clicking on one podcast episode in new episodes section results in playing the item below it, resulting in another hard close. The desktop app doesn't have many issues but they did make a change to playlists a couple of months ago where some useless sidebar comes out from the right when you play a song. I ended up abandoning them for podcasts all together about a month ago. Too many people working there making changes to things that aren't broken for the sake of making changes. Not a single thing they have done in the last ~4 years has been positive.
deng 3y ago
I just canceled my Spotify family account when I realized my kids used it to watch stupid TikTok videos all the time. I mean what is this, why does Spotify even support videos at all? Looking further, I realized that there's apparently no quality control for "podcasts" uploads at all, it's filled with absolute garbage, often hidden as "ASMR" where there are just porn noises and stuff like that. Moved to Deezer, seems OK so far.
- tacker2000 3y ago
  Where can you watch videos? I just checked on the iOS app and couldnt find anything?
  - deng 3y ago
    Simply search for stuff in Podcasts, for instance https://open.spotify.com/episode/6IFpCggUjo3wlTisJh4w7o https://open.spotify.com/episode/6IFpCggUjo3wlTisJh4w7o
nickstinemates 3y ago
I've gone back in time. I hate all of the edge cases for these stupid fucking streaming apps. Just put some mp3s on the phone and listen. Download podcasts via RSS. Full library available over tailscale as needed.
palijer 3y ago
I just wish they would stop trying to sell me something I already bought. I don't want to be exposed to all the popups and videos and fees etc that "maximize engagement" I just want a music library that has everything, good search, and recommendations when I purposely seek them out.
sowbug 3y ago
I disagree that Google sets a good example with their "clings" that pop up and point out UI changes. (That's what they're called internally.) Clings are annoying and disruptive, and nearly all of them alert the user to an unwanted new feature. Visualize them as a pop-up ad placed for free by a promotion candidate who needs usage numbers artificially spiked to demonstrate impact, and you'll share my negative feelings about clings. While I'm here, will the person at Spotify who writes the Tesla app's frontend please get the networking code reviewed by the app's backend team? The backend code reconnects immediately when the network changes (for example, when a car backs out of a driveway and switches from WiFi to cell), so the current song keeps playing and can sometimes even skip to the next song. But the UX is frozen, except for the spinning circle, for minutes, until it says something went wrong and waits for me to press play again. Every other part of the car handles network changes gracefully, except the Spotify app, and it's had this problem since the very first version. How can this be so broken for so many years?
- coldpie 3y ago
  > I disagree that Google sets a good example with their "clings" that pop up and point out UI changes. I strongly agree with you. When I open an app I'm very familiar with, I'm usually on "autopilot" so I just muscle-memory mash whatever it is I wanted to accomplish by opening the app. Often I'll see one of those little popup things appear and then disappear since I already hit the button I wanted to do. I wonder if the popup thing had something important to say? Who knows! It's gone now. Additionally, when I open an app, my goal is to accomplish a task, not fiddle around with your shiny new UI. I'm here to do a thing, please stop getting in my way. Garbage UI paradigm.
  - ananddtyagi 3y ago
    > Often I'll see one of those little popup things appear and then disappear since I already hit the button I wanted to do. I wonder if the popup thing had something important to say? Who knows! It's gone now. I thought I was the only one who got annoyed by this. I wish they had some kind of history or in app place to view the updates all together.
- 3y ago
toastercat 3y ago
I'm gonna be the boomer here, and say that I never fully switched to Spotify. Almost 20 years after 2005, and I'm still using mp3s with foobar2000 and Shuttle on my phone. When I want to listen to something I don't have on my phone, I find it and play it on NewPipe.
gamecatz 3y ago
I've almost organically switched to using Youtube Music over Spotify because the android app is such a poor experience and constantly changing for the worse.
karmakaze 3y ago
The thing I hate on the desktop app is the search bar going away on the home display. Now have to click the search icon on the left nav, which shows the search input field at top: in the blank space (right of < > back/forward buttons) where it could have been all along! I really get fed up with too much misapplied UX research.
wallfacer 3y ago
Why can’t they make a custom menu of my most used buttons? That would be real user customization, not a reel of my top listened songs. Or better still, let me make my own Player layout. Today, I find the UI downgrade buries Offline, Playback, Settings, One more layer deeper, behind a circle that has the first letter of my username.

75 points by ananddtyagi 3y ago

The other day they randomly changed the “Like” button for an “Add to Playlist” one. Though they did communicate that change pretty clearly (there was a popup notifying the user about this behaviour etc.), I think it was a horrible spontaneous decision. I’m glad they reverted the thing the same day it was rolled out. Why doesn’t Spotify add an opt-in for experimental features/updates or distribute an “experimental” version of the app through app stores?

gwill 3y ago
and the like/add button doesn't have consistent placement or action. on some screens it still behaves as a like button and sometimes it's on the left. i had muscle memory to tap it and found i was disliking songs i wanted to like.
kredd 3y ago
Opt-in experiments carry a huge bias, which is hard to extrapolate to the general user base. As annoying as changes Spotify can be, at least it’s highly unlikely to be used for “important stuff” like emails or general business stuff. Easier to justify small annoyances.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Incentive folks to be part of the experiment via discounts
scubazealous 3y ago
I liked the new add to playlist feature, at least on my iphone. I press it once to like the song and double press it to add to a playlist using a checkbox on a menu, and I can choose to take the song out of my liked playlist on that menu. This eliminated a few clicks and is easier while driving. Intuitive and easy to use once I recognized what they did.
fellerts 3y ago
The like button disappeared for me a while ago and was replaced by a ⊕ that adds it to the "liked songs" playlist. Are you saying your app still shows the heart button to like a song? Or are you talking about the thumbs-up button that was also removed at some point?

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

10+ years and still no light theme for people with astigmatism who may prefer that yet they seem to re-arrange the UI layout every few months for no discernable benefit

cryne 3y ago
You can use https://github.com/spicetify https://github.com/spicetify to customize the appearance
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  thanks
HenryBemis 3y ago
> for no discernible benefit They notice that majority of the users spend more time listening to the 'automation' of growing your playlists, auto-play similar songs in the end of your songs, etc. So maybe their changes anger you, me, and a few others, the majority absorbs them without a thought.
morkalork 3y ago
Getting my eyes tested for the first time and finding out I have astigmatism in one eye was eye opening (sorry). When blue LED panels started showing up in appliances everywhere I didn't understand why they were so popular. At night, I couldn't read the time on the microwave oven from across the room because it was so bright and smeared compared to red/amber lights. Now I realize it's just me..
- CharlesW 3y ago
  We're not rare! Around ⅓ of the U.S. population has astigmatism.
- fellerts 3y ago
  You can work around this issue by curling your index finger tightly so it forms a tiny hole near the 2nd knuckle and looking through that. What you've got now is a makeshift pinhole camera that should fix any "smearing". It'll also help you see clearly at a distance without glasses!

HenryBemis 3y ago

I dislike the fact that on the changes on the Google Play Store, instead of listing the key changes, they have the boilerplate BS "we work to enhance...". As a good practice, and having suffered from the stupid (and dick-ish imho) changes, I do not update their app, and I have my NoRootFirewall blocking plenty of their garbage IPs. This doesn't let me see my "annual lists" but I don't mind that a bit. Zero value vs some privacy.. I pick privacy every time.

shmde 3y ago

Spotify try not to update my windows client on every restart *Impossible Challenge!!!!*

gadders 3y ago

They honestly can't write an Andoid app to save their life. "Hey! Here's a notification for a new podcast! Want to click on it and see the episode details? Fuck you, here is the Spotify home screen instead." "Yeah, you know those 278 songs you have stored locally? I'm going to re-download the whole lot just because I feel like it." "Oh, you've clicked on a link to a playlist? Extra fuck you, here's the Spotify home screen, search for it yourself." "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." //edit// Sorry - forgot one "I see you want to play some music you have downloaded when you're in a bad network area. Sucks to be you, I'm going to spend 5 minutes auditing all your cellular and wifi connectivity before I can be bothered to draw the screen or show you a song list." //end of edit// Honestly, it's a complete clown show and the only thing going for it is the licensing of so much music.

junon 3y ago
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.
- kyleee 3y ago
  What do we think the average comp of the people implementing all this awfulness? 200k?
Jenk 3y ago
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.

saos 3y ago

Oh boy, I'm planning to write something around Reddit testing for mobile app and web app. I'm sick and tired of their testing and horrible dark UX pattern. * Screen take over to force push notifications so I can view my own notification!!!!!! (Mobile) * Creating new tabs when tapping on threads (Web) * Removing notification alert from homepage (Mobile web) If you want a lesson in dark UX patterns and poor testing...just visit Reddit

aniforprez 3y ago
Reddit's new UI is a complete trash fire and has reliably been so since day 1. As a developer myself it is very hard for me to call others incompetent because I can definitely feel the pain of serving millions of daily users and working under some idiot product managers especially for a social media app... but even so I have no qualms about calling the reddit dev team as a whole utterly incompetent after botching their web AND android front ends for almost a decade and making mistake after user hostile mistake and not even making the app stable in the process. Reddit good down almost weekly in some form or another and seeing the "you bwoke weddit sowwy" page has been consistent

cik 3y ago

Spotify is something that I'll pay for, forever - even in my grave. The thing is it's an absolutely horrible service, with a rubbish application, amazingly across all platforms. But their catalogue is incredible. I keep trying to use alternatives, and they're not even close - especially when you listen to music in multiple non English geographies and languages. Their cross-language algorithmic suggestions have also been (shockingly) on point, and improving. But lord, their applications are beyond horrible.

wombat-man 3y ago
I've been trying youtube music. It's fine. The main annoyance is everyone uses spotify so sharing playlists is just impossible. Not sure about their non-english offerings.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  My main annoyance is the amount of music missing from YT Music, especially parts of albums, but I still use it because it comes with my YT premium account. It's like, oh cool, they have this album! Oh crap, they only have a couple of songs from it. And don't even get me started on not skipping songs that I've thumbed down in a playlist, or not being able to like artists because it mucks up my YT video subscriptions. But despite all that, it's still my primary because the recommendation engine is leaps ahead of Spotify.
xoac 3y ago
[flagged]
- fullshark 3y ago
  The attitude is mine, I"ve been a spotify subscriber for almost a decade now, and it's the corpus of music that keeps me there, not the apps/interface and certainly not the exclusive podcasts. Spotify knows this, and also knows they only license the corpus and get squeezed on it so they do these experiments to try and find some way to get users to pay for something they actually own (recommendation engine, exclusive podcasts etc) and as a user it's just endlessly annoying.

skydhash 3y ago

Apple’s Music is not that good (and less clients than spotify) but it’s the one I chose just because of being centered around albums and a deterministic interface. Library management is hellish on spotify

CharlesW 3y ago
> Apple’s Music is not that good… Like Apple Maps, it's a "sleeper" that continues to get better with time. For anyone curious about where Spotify is still better in 2023, this article is a pretty good summary: https://medium.com/@iamtimbaker/spotify-vs-apple-music-which-is-better-7b1aecb23039 https://medium.com/@iamtimbaker/spotify-vs-apple-music-which...

id00 3y ago

Every time I open their ios app I don't know what to expect. Often features that I so used to just stop working: they broke enqueue songs a few times, local music, sorting within playlists - all basic features. And I don't even want to mention their persistance to show me podcasts (and now audiobooks) without an ability to get rid of them. In the app that most of their users solely use for music. Spotify is doing its best to follow enshittification playbook.

badcppdev 3y ago

I almost posted on HN the other day about the annoying podcast UX in Spotify. The Home > Podcast section on the Android app shows the most recent 8 podcasts you've listened to. If you follow more than 8 podcasts then you need to use the 'Your library' section to check if the other podcasts have new episodes. Spotify will randomly choose new podcasts rather that play you new episodes of podcasts you are already following. Edit: And the fact that I can't get a history of what I've played drives me up the wall. Podcasts and songs.

RugnirViking 3y ago

They seem to have a habit of making things worse every time they make a change, I wish they would just stop trying. I suppose they have the VC curse so a merely profitable buisness isnt enough they must constantly be spewing out new ideas in the hopes of prolonging the exponential curve a little bit longer. The one that annoys me the most isn in fact that when I open the app I get some popup in my face about something. I only ever open the app with a mind to already doing something, so I always flick it away, then some time later sometimes regret it because I would actually like to see whats new and can't find a list of them anywhere, like some labyrinthine music menu stack

eddmakesio 3y ago
Spotify is a public company!
- doctaj 3y ago
  Even worse, then?
ryandrake 3y ago
> They seem to have a habit of making things worse every time they make a change, I wish they would just stop trying. It's an industry-wide problem. At some point the software is good enough, and should be considered "done". But there's still a development team sitting around--what should they do?? Developers gotta develop, so they'll just keep changing it forever. I remember hearing the saying "Programmers are like beavers. Leave a beaver alone to decide what to do and they'll just keep building dams, regardless of the fact that their home is done." I don't know if that's really true about beavers, but it's true about software organizations. The whole software development team will just continue working on the software even long past the point where they're done.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  I don't know if thats the entire thing though. There are thousands of annoyances and bugs a team could be spending their time fixing to really make the product great. It's not like its "done", in fact its going in the wrong direction. It's more of the "feature factory" mentality imo, a culture of throwing stuff out the door as fast as possible without regard for quality. Its reflective of poor internal incentives and culture.

dangus 3y ago

Don’t like it, don’t buy it. Spotify has numerous competitors. Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music, Deezer, Pandora, Qobuz and the list goes on and on.

maleldil 3y ago
Spotify has the best collection by far. So many artists you can only find there.
- drcongo 3y ago
  There's an ever growing list of artists who release everywhere except Spotify too though, including me.
- dangus 3y ago
  Maybe other people listen to way more music than me but I’ve never had this come up for me. At the very least I’ve been able to find the album on a digital store (“the old fashioned way”) or Bandcamp. I’ve had a grand total of one album from Japan be steaming-exclusive and I managed to import a CD for like ten bucks and rip it the older fashioned way.
- redserk 3y ago
  This depends on who you listen to. I listen to various sub-genres of EDM and find that Apple Music and Tidal carry almost all of my library. I've had issues where both Spotify and Tidal lose some songs for a few months but mysteriously gain them back.
- abenga 3y ago
  I use Deezer because it was the only option (sans VPN shenanigans) in my country for years, and I only ever have failed to find one song I often watch on YouTube. Maybe my taste is pretty basic though.
aworks 3y ago
I wouldn't want to give up Spotify Connect across all my devices.

ecmascript 3y ago

The thing is that they perfected some of the app a long time ago but since they employ so many engineers they need to keep changing stuff even things that obviously was better before. I think we have a term for that and it is over-engineering

lancesells 3y ago
I think the term is being human. There's probably a subset of employees that are motivated by doing something positive and new at their job which takes up a good portion of their life. It's fun to create things. You see it in other apps as well. Things like the new Slack changes where I've yet to hear of anyone who asked for or liked them. What would be better is if companies gave that need to create a better outlet than changing things for 100s of millions of people.

dbsmith83 3y ago

The "Friend Activity" screen is also pretty much non-functioning. We had the ability to see what our friends were listening to in various other apps decades ago (usually via some plugin)

xoac 3y ago
It is incredible how shit all the streaming services are at anything related to interacting with your friends.

drcongo 3y ago

Stop using Spotify. They've laid their bad faith bare for all the world to see for years, why keep paying them to piss you off?

WXLCKNO 3y ago
Because I'm on android so I'm not going for apple music and their price is still much better and more convenient than pirating music. I never ever think about cancelling Spotify but I think about cancelling Netflix once a month.
- doctaj 3y ago
  YouTube music is fine (and comes with YouTube premium for free - or the other way around, depending on how you think about it).
  - drcongo 3y ago
    I'm sorry that frying pan isn't very comfortable, here, come sit in this fire.

jordanpg 3y ago

The Spotify UI is so weird. It's like their UI/UX team lives on an island and innovates on their own, without contact with the wider world or best practices. This is a company that tried to make themselves the epicenter of the podcasting world and has not even (apparently?) attempted to put a decent podcast UI into their client. Right now, I'm browsing around on the "Home" page and I don't see a single podcast anywhere. I don't know how to get them other than to click the "Search" button. Someone at the top isn't paying attention.

WXLCKNO 3y ago

A recent update added "audio quality" and "video quality" settings to the contextual menu on individual songs. This is a setting I set once and never touch again usually but the worst part is they put it above the "Go to song radio" option in the same menu that I use all the time. Who designs this stuff lol, embarassing.

palmfacehn 3y ago

The recommendations never really clicked for me. When I do try to use the webapp I get loads of suggestions I cannot dislike or block at all. Apparently this functionality is no longer available in the webapp. I suppose this is supposed to make me want to run their bloated app or upgrade to premium. They have a feedback forum where other users are reporting the same problems. The staff politely rationalizes the horrible UX and offers irrelevant boilerplate responses. Occasionally, the site will tell me that a podcast is not available in "your region". What is my region? Am I the reigning monarch? Do I personally own this country? Or is it that we are all serfs tied to the land which webservices geotarget us to? The videos never play, but the webapp does interrupt podcasts halfway through to create a paused video UI. Then there are the typical wrong language content choices being shoveled into my recommendations. No, the UX isn't worthwhile. It does inspire an occasional rant. If I just want to listen to a song, why autoplay something totally unrelated next? And I cannot dislike it? Terrible, very bad to horrible.

hbn 3y ago

It's bizarre that article opens using Google as a GOOD example of how to treat users because they practically invented the "users are perpetual beta testers and we will never release a complete/stable product" method of software design/releases. It's what finally pushed me off Android after a decade, and 3 years into my iPhone move, I haven't stopped appreciating feeling respected as a user relative to being in the Google ecosystem. I mean, Apple isn't perfect, but generally redesigns or changes will be announced by a real human at one of their big yearly events. And they seem to be pretty picky about doing that type of thing. Google services are redesigned, shuttered, re-launched, rebranded, etc on a regular basis. Every new Android update the quick settings are completely redesigned, the settings app is completely redesigned, your messaging app would get redesigns from a Play Store update out of nowhere. Sometimes not even from the Play Store, they started getting into using server-side flags to enable UI redesigns so you open the app one day and it's completely redesigned, open it again the next and it's back to how it was before. Meanwhile I open Messages on my iPhone and it looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed at the iPhone reveal in 2007. And the Settings app looks and behaves pretty much like it did on launch too. Google's approach seems to have become the default among many software companies over the past decade. I really hope people start to catch on with how much of a negative reputation it's gotten them these days and that methodology gets shed.

ananddtyagi 3y ago
That's fair. I've been using Android for the past 10 years after originally using iPhones, and I definitely agree that it's frustrating how much each OS update changes the UI. I'm actually considering switching back after seeing Apple's more recent OS design updates. I find Google's updates on apps like docs and their work suite are a little more navigable than the Spotify desktop app UI changes, but that's definitely not the case for all their products. It's a good point that they did basically setup the idea of users being "perpetual beta testers". Nice insight!

tacker2000 3y ago

This is gonna be a prime example of “enshittification” soon. Why can’t I re-order the songs in my “Liked” playlist?? Who decides to remove a feature like that?

RiOuseR 3y ago

[dead]

unethical_ban 3y ago

They removed the ability to pin playlist shortcuts to the Android home screen. They did it without any warning or reasoning. On their forums, a number of people express the desire for that feature to be back. That triggered an automatic notification saying " this idea is getting traction someone will take a look at it! ". And yet. After 9 years of being a paying customer, I switched to youtube music.

theragra 3y ago
Reasoning is probably that they want you to listen to what they want you to listen, not that you want to listen.

internet101010 3y ago

The first thing I do when I open the Spotify app on my iPhone is do a hard close of said app because God forbid I want an up-to-date list of recently updated podcasts. I understand trying to keep things in cache but for things that require frequent updates that should be the default yet there isn't even a swipe down to refresh function. The podcast ads also break the player like 30% of the time, resulting in another hard close. In CarPlay occasionally there is an issue where clicking on one podcast episode in new episodes section results in playing the item below it, resulting in another hard close. The desktop app doesn't have many issues but they did make a change to playlists a couple of months ago where some useless sidebar comes out from the right when you play a song. I ended up abandoning them for podcasts all together about a month ago. Too many people working there making changes to things that aren't broken for the sake of making changes. Not a single thing they have done in the last ~4 years has been positive.

deng 3y ago

I just canceled my Spotify family account when I realized my kids used it to watch stupid TikTok videos all the time. I mean what is this, why does Spotify even support videos at all? Looking further, I realized that there's apparently no quality control for "podcasts" uploads at all, it's filled with absolute garbage, often hidden as "ASMR" where there are just porn noises and stuff like that. Moved to Deezer, seems OK so far.

tacker2000 3y ago
Where can you watch videos? I just checked on the iOS app and couldnt find anything?
- deng 3y ago
  Simply search for stuff in Podcasts, for instance https://open.spotify.com/episode/6IFpCggUjo3wlTisJh4w7o https://open.spotify.com/episode/6IFpCggUjo3wlTisJh4w7o

nickstinemates 3y ago

I've gone back in time. I hate all of the edge cases for these stupid fucking streaming apps. Just put some mp3s on the phone and listen. Download podcasts via RSS. Full library available over tailscale as needed.

palijer 3y ago

I just wish they would stop trying to sell me something I already bought. I don't want to be exposed to all the popups and videos and fees etc that "maximize engagement" I just want a music library that has everything, good search, and recommendations when I purposely seek them out.

sowbug 3y ago

I disagree that Google sets a good example with their "clings" that pop up and point out UI changes. (That's what they're called internally.) Clings are annoying and disruptive, and nearly all of them alert the user to an unwanted new feature. Visualize them as a pop-up ad placed for free by a promotion candidate who needs usage numbers artificially spiked to demonstrate impact, and you'll share my negative feelings about clings. While I'm here, will the person at Spotify who writes the Tesla app's frontend please get the networking code reviewed by the app's backend team? The backend code reconnects immediately when the network changes (for example, when a car backs out of a driveway and switches from WiFi to cell), so the current song keeps playing and can sometimes even skip to the next song. But the UX is frozen, except for the spinning circle, for minutes, until it says something went wrong and waits for me to press play again. Every other part of the car handles network changes gracefully, except the Spotify app, and it's had this problem since the very first version. How can this be so broken for so many years?

coldpie 3y ago
> I disagree that Google sets a good example with their "clings" that pop up and point out UI changes. I strongly agree with you. When I open an app I'm very familiar with, I'm usually on "autopilot" so I just muscle-memory mash whatever it is I wanted to accomplish by opening the app. Often I'll see one of those little popup things appear and then disappear since I already hit the button I wanted to do. I wonder if the popup thing had something important to say? Who knows! It's gone now. Additionally, when I open an app, my goal is to accomplish a task, not fiddle around with your shiny new UI. I'm here to do a thing, please stop getting in my way. Garbage UI paradigm.
- ananddtyagi 3y ago
  > Often I'll see one of those little popup things appear and then disappear since I already hit the button I wanted to do. I wonder if the popup thing had something important to say? Who knows! It's gone now. I thought I was the only one who got annoyed by this. I wish they had some kind of history or in app place to view the updates all together.
3y ago

toastercat 3y ago

I'm gonna be the boomer here, and say that I never fully switched to Spotify. Almost 20 years after 2005, and I'm still using mp3s with foobar2000 and Shuttle on my phone. When I want to listen to something I don't have on my phone, I find it and play it on NewPipe.

gamecatz 3y ago

I've almost organically switched to using Youtube Music over Spotify because the android app is such a poor experience and constantly changing for the worse.

karmakaze 3y ago

The thing I hate on the desktop app is the search bar going away on the home display. Now have to click the search icon on the left nav, which shows the search input field at top: in the blank space (right of < > back/forward buttons) where it could have been all along! I really get fed up with too much misapplied UX research.

wallfacer 3y ago

Why can’t they make a custom menu of my most used buttons? That would be real user customization, not a reel of my top listened songs. Or better still, let me make my own Player layout. Today, I find the UI downgrade buries Offline, Playback, Settings, One more layer deeper, behind a circle that has the first letter of my username.