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Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usabil

by rot256 16d ago

Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies". I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples: - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason. - When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?

HeadOfProbing 16d ago
I couldn't disagree more
jcul 15d ago
Wow, I'm usually the first to complain about buggy software and bad UX. But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues. Everything works really well? I can manage playlists, play on one device, control on another etc.
amboo7 13d ago
You should have tried Deezer. I had switched to Spotify because I couldn't tolerate bugs anymore.
zipy124 16d ago
It's actually crazy that a music app struggles to play music many times. By far my worst big app experience.
NaiveBayesian 16d ago
Yes, the Android app is particularly bad. For the past couple of weeks, it's gotten to a point where the app will take 30s to load on my phone. Nothing, not even reinstalling the app fixes this.
tormeh 16d ago
It's a music player, and it's way too heavy for what it does. Well, it does a lot it doesn't need to, too. Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm. Since I only have 16GB on my work laptop that's noticeable. I'd love it if Spotify AB could replace its client with a native Rust one, although using an immediate-mode GUI library like fastpotify does might not be the best option... Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. Feel like Spotify's recommendations have taken a nosedive lately, so that wouldn't hold me back too much.
- shinycode 16d ago
  Quite annoying when, as we see in the tv show “the playlist” that traces back the story of Spotify, the founder put a huge emphasis on performance to differentiate them from the rest and create the best possible UX…
  - minton 16d ago
    Well it will only get better now that the “Code is no longer a constraint”! AI can just do everything for them now. https://youtu.be/zFslvuvYifQ?si=sEN270fkICYSpaLU https://youtu.be/zFslvuvYifQ?si=sEN270fkICYSpaLU
- lostlogin 16d ago
  > It's a music player Spotify doesn’t completely agree with that. ‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’ I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard. Yuck. https://support.spotify.com/nz/article/what-is-spotify/ https://support.spotify.com/nz/article/what-is-spotify/
  - rplnt 16d ago
    Isn't it just another ad distribution platform? The amount of ads they started to push to paying(!) users recently makes me want to cancel it every day (but I'm also too lazy to seek alternatives).
mogoh 16d ago
Why is spotify so popular? There are different solutions to listen to music. What does spotify do that almost no one else does? Is it the music library or something else? I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).
- threethirtytwo 16d ago
  Another reason why they are so popular is that they were first to market. They’ve been good enough that they have not lost first mover advantage that other first movers often lose (MySpace for example)
  - vostrocity 16d ago
    People often cite they were first to market, but isn't the bigger factor that they are backed by all the big music labels?
- flexagoon 16d ago
  For me it's mostly the big library and Spotify Jam
- lirolero 16d ago
  I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it just works. I’ve never had any of the issues people are mentioning in this thread. The app isn’t slow or buggy for me, I’ve never had artists I listen to disappear from my playlists, and I can find pretty much every song I want to listen to. Most people I know use Spotify too, so sharing stuff is just a little more convenient.
  - dgritsko 16d ago
    Yeah, this is my experience as well. It's mostly fine, and I've been using it nearly every day for years.
  - laurentiurad 16d ago
    I share the same experience. I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness. The Garmin app is also really good.
BatteryMountain 16d ago
I've cancelled mine 5 years ago after they keep showing me ganster music and podcasts on my main page, even though I no history of listening or liking such content. So they keep trying to force it into my life. Secondly, they messed up the explorability of artists, playlist and related music. They also removed music from the catalogue, meaning on my playlist there are big memory holes of my favourite music, as they don't even show the artist or song name anymore. They also broke the offline-mode for when I drove my car.. so even if I switched it to offline-mode, music would still not play (after they downloaded and using 10GB+ on my phone). Then they added Joe Rogan and pushed other politics and stuff, more mainstream gangster shit. I just needed a good music player with a good discovery system and decent offline-mode. It used to be very simple. Now its a mess. So my only path/answer to this was to cancel it. They poisoned the well so efficiently that I will never trust another streaming service again for my lifetime. I hate rewarding bad business practices, businesses pushing their ideologies towards me. No thanks.
- AtNightWeCode 16d ago
  The problem with gangster music was a hack I believe. Spotify never admitted it but I have many friends that had that problem. I did not.
- deleted 16d ago
  [deleted]
- lostlogin 16d ago
  Their Joe Rogan period was baffling. It reminded me of Apple and U2. Apple’s boomer surprise when they discovered we don’t all like U2 was hilarious.
samcrawford 16d ago
I switched from Spotify to Amazon Music about 9 months ago, and cancelled Spotify Premium as a result (due to price, not bugs). Amazon Music is so much worse. 1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse. 2. I had Amazon Music eat my entire cellular plan's data monthly allowance in a day, after it seemingly got stuck in a loop trying to download the same podcast again and again. The podcast is unplayable when it gets in this state, even on perfect Wi-Fi, it just never starts playback. This has happened twice now (incidentally on the same podcast, but different episodes), even after deleting and reinstalling the app entirely. The second bug is a deal breaker, so I've gone back to Spotify.
- dominotw 16d ago
  apple music is good if you dont need it to be feature packed. best value for money if you use youtube is youtube music app that you get from youtube premium.
- wombat-man 16d ago
  It's always been terrible afaik. I don't know why they bother
- shellwizard 16d ago
  Have they replicated 1:1 Spotify's UX in Amazon music finally? I was a user 7 years ago and their Android app back then sucked, big time.
- unfocused 16d ago
  I switched from Amazon music after many years to Spotify, as Amazon's App was just terrible. Never worked well offline in my watch or phone (Apple). I only went to Spotify because my kids wanted it. The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.
- psygn89 16d ago
  I mean, Amazon just sucks in general when it comes to design. I don't understand why Amazon videos (or whatever their purchased streaming app is) doesn't even queue up sequential movies automatically. It'll play the first Harry Potter movie, then skip to the third, fourth, and then the second, etc. It's not just HP , either.
dominotw 16d ago
its run by one ceo guy gustav's whims and fancies. he is obviously not a ux expert but every feature in the app needs his "vision"
softwaredoug 16d ago
My biggest complaint is the device switching. I pick up my phone and hit play, my laptop starts playing the music .. which in turn causes my AirPods to connect to my laptop I have to go manually hunt to connect everything correctly Every. Single. Time.
deleted 16d ago
[deleted]
NothingAboutAny 16d ago
It truly has been one of the worst UX experiences and poorly made apps that ever made it to mainstream. I remember a decade or so ago there being a bunch of buzz about them in software dev because they were a microservice node.js/react stack or something with each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team. I can vividly remember thinking "oh that's probably why when I change song sometimes the album art doesn't update." they're living proof your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.
- leoedin 16d ago
  I worked for a startup in 2019 which was really pushing the "Spotify model" of team structure. Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. The fact the technology output of the Spotify model - the Spotify app - seemed to be kind of crap didn't seem to matter. I think the main output of the Spotify team structure was blog posts promoting the Spotify team structure.
  - freedomben 16d ago
    > Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. Gross over-simplification. For anyone curious they have videos out there, though they are 10+ years old now so may no longer be accurate, but in 2019-era this was still a thing (company I worked for did it too).[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvfz4HGtoPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvfz4HGtoPc
    - stefanlindbohm 16d ago
      This video was created in 2014 and was more a description of what they strived for at that point rather than of the full messy reality. Spotify quickly after that grew larger than those ideas would sustain (without changes) and rapidly became more alike any other tech corpo. Certainly around 2019-2020 it was not like in the video by any means. Some structures or names of concepts stayed way longer than the actual practices as described. (I was active as a coach in Stockholm around this period and know multiple people, both engineers and coaches, who worked at Spotify including Henrik the author of the video.)
kingleopold 16d ago
have you tried apple music app on mac? Apple music is also wrong in so many levels I personally believe teams that work on inside Appple hate it and made so bad intentionally. There is no other explanation.
parpfish 16d ago
i'd love it if spotify split into two companies: - an enterprise platform that just provided a an API to access/play songs and direct the payment to the correct rightsholders - a consumer app that built on top of that to provide the 'spotify' we all have let a whole ecosystem of music streaming apps take off that cater to different niches of listeners. each app would be able to differentiation themselves with their UI but also features like recommendations/playlists/etc. And spotify wouldn't see them as competitors because they'd still be getting their cut because they all go through their API.
- megagpt4 16d ago
  Rights holders would never allow it. It would be too easy for their enterprise customer to underreport plays.
tempesttempo86 16d ago
I recently started encountering full on crashes on iOS, as well as random freezing. Not to mention whole navigation just feels 'off', like canceling navigation mid animation. Nowadays, non-native apps don't have issues like that.
duxup 16d ago
I’ll take it a step further and say I think the current music player-isms UX is just not easy to use and gets in my way of enjoying music…
hardwaregeek 16d ago
It’s a music player that regularly cannot play music. I don’t understand how you get that wrong for so long.
- toomuchtodo 16d ago
  They’re profitable and customers keep paying. Incentives->Outcomes.
  - jtbayly 16d ago
    I canceled my subscription and moved to Apple Music
    - toomuchtodo 16d ago
      > Spotify has 777 million monthly active users worldwide, which includes 300 million paying subscribers. > Generates approximately €4.8 billion ($5.5 billion) in revenue, representing a 14% year-over-year increase, alongside a record gross margin of 33.4%
      - jtbayly 16d ago
        Oh, I know they are doing fine without me. lol But if you don’t like what they are doing, vote with your wallet. In this case, there actually are choices, which is nice.
- thedanbob 16d ago
  I ran sound at a friend's wedding recently and unfortunately the music was all on Spotify. Every time I tried to play a specific song from a playlist, "Spotify can't play this item right now" and it would skip to the next one (or the one after that). I ended up having to yt-dlp all the timeline-specific songs.
  - BetterThanSober 16d ago
    Probably due to business/commercial licensing, I'm sure they have separate account for playing music in a public space
skybrian 16d ago
This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I’ve not noticed it being slow.
wombat-man 16d ago
I gave YouTube music a try, mostly for the free premium and I have to say, it's ok. It still hiccups sometimes when I'm on the subway or a plane but I don't miss Spotify. I do have a more pared down selection of mp3s loaded on my device in case of emergency, but I use it less and less now.
skybrian 16d ago
This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I haven’t noticed it being particularly slow either. Could it be due to having different hardware, different expectations, something else?
- esskay 16d ago
  > it basically works fine for playing music Until you want to play back a playlist in random order over airplay or bluetooth, then the decade old bug with thousands of replies on their forum confirming it surfaces, and it only loops the first 100 songs in the playlist. The number of bugs in their service that have existed since inception is insane. It's a buggy mess, and the UI & UX is comically poor. Not to mention the resource usage, as someone else pointed out below its incredibly insane that they think it's ok for it to be such a massive resource hog.
  - skybrian 16d ago
    Okay! I never do that, though, so it doesn't affect me. This has been a "works on my machine" moment.
edgyquant 16d ago
Another annoyance is the “genres” in your liked songs. They change seemingly at random and when you select a genre eg country it has the most ass backwards way of grouping songs so I’ll get rap songs playing despite having selected folk or whatever
solarkraft 16d ago
> Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason. If I remember correctly, it has a plus on the side to add it to the playlist. Clearly different I guess (and why would you want to listen to a song before adding it to the playlist amirite?). I also love the way you have to refresh a list to get 3 new songs instead of just getting a scrolling list where you can go back.
e40 16d ago
I switched to YouTube Music and I miss the Spotify UI.
foresterre 16d ago
> - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason. There's a ton of these inconsistencies. For example, the new releases albums where songs become available over time also do not have it. It's infuriating how inconsistent the UI is sometimes. Not so long ago they also had two versions of the "swipe right to queue" UI, one with long swipe (the current one), and one with a much shorter one. I preferred the shorter (with the hard break) one because it is much clearer when a song actually gets added to the queue. What often happens when you're adding multiple songs to the queue, if you only swipe a little bit, it is unclear if it was enough to add it to the queue. With one song this isn't a problem because a message with "added to queue" is shown, but for multiple songs, the messages are shown on top of each other.
herbst 16d ago
The whole service is shit, all music you discover is bought to be there, a lot of it is AI.
AtNightWeCode 16d ago
I am a user since the beginning and had premium for almost as long. The state of the app is bad. Crash fest. They pretty much brags about that they slop code it. But was it better before? Let me give you a hall of fame of historical bugs/features. 1. Impossible to purge the play queue. Had to delete every track one by one. 2. Completely broke liked songs years after the feature was launched. 3. They broke offline mode like a billion times. Just download everything again. Especially annoying back in the days when mobile data was expensive. Still does not work like half of the time. 4. Changed to a yellow typeface! I am not even kidding. 5. Included some bittorrent like file sharing in the background.
- beart 16d ago
  The number of times I boarded an airplane to find my offline song list empty... I had to completely stop relying on it.
Tactical45 16d ago
I think the notion that it's the worst piece of software is a bit of a stretch here. I've used various streaming music players and Spotify has been the best by far. Doesn't mean it's perfect. I get that not all edge cases (eg swipe gestures) are bullet proof but that doesn't make it terrible software.
- esafak 16d ago
  WinAmp was smaller, faster, and more customizable thirty years ago.
- beart 16d ago
  It's objectively really bad at a lot things. I've always had the feeling that the music is not even a primary feature of their product. The last time I used it, I uninstalled once I realized that my kids could watch Logan Paul YouTube videos through the Spotify app. These masquerade as podcasts, but like a Trojan horse they are just vods of YouTube content. And at the time there was literally no way to disable this. No way to either turn off podcasts or specific content through parental controls or otherwise. I just wanted to give my kids a way to listen to music while reading. I have since switched to our local community radio station.
tyre 16d ago
They’ve left Airplay out of their Mac app for the history of the company and I have no idea why. They have hundreds of engineers. I have airplay running on a raspberry pi since 2019. The black and neon is truly a not-good choice for a UI. Nevertheless, they persist. Apple Music has a much better UX. Things like “play next” when you want to play that song next but not clear your other queued up songs are little treats that Spotify took years to catch up to. Many of the other bugs—which people document for them!—go untouched for literally years. It’s fascinating to me how companies like this ignore easy wins for their users. Have a couple engineers burn down all of those and you’ll win fans (or at least not create enemies.) Take the wins!
- lotsofpulp 16d ago
  The Music app on my macOS Sequoia 15.7.5 has an airplay button on the top right, to the left of the lyrics button.
ddejohn 16d ago
> Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies". I left Spotify about a year ago and have tried Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, and Youtube Music. They all have equally worse UI/UX. The Tidal and Deezer apps on Windows were absolute dogshit and would constantly bug out, randomly stop playing, freeze, take ages to load, etc. YTM's UI is awful, and it does not use your liked/saved songs and albums for its recommendations if your Youtube history is turned off, which isn't explained anywhere that I could find. Just absolutely baffling product design decisions all over the place. I'm blown away by how much all the big music streaming apps suck. Music player UIs were a solved problem 20 years ago. More and more now I'm using Bandcamp, Subvert, local music enthusiast Discord servers, and even Reddit to discover new music. It's a giant pain in the ass, but it's still less unpleasant than the apps.
- veeti 15d ago
  The vast support for Tidal in these discussions is pretty baffling. The whole thing is just an abandoned Jack Dorsey side hustle. Basic things like gapless playback don't work. Playback on dodgy connections is spotty. I have my own fair share complaints of Spotify UX but it actually works as a music player anywhere and everywhere.
  - ddejohn 13d ago
    Eh, I had plenty of problems with Spotify too. My point was more that they're all pretty shit.
paaloeye 16d ago
100% Android version/problem. Both desktop and iOS ones are very good. As much as a hate Electron, Spotify is a pretty good example of good use of E.
JonathanRaines 16d ago
When listening to a podcast on Android, the lock screen skip-15-second buttons are reversed.

by rot256 16d ago

HeadOfProbing 16d ago

I couldn't disagree more

jcul 15d ago

Wow, I'm usually the first to complain about buggy software and bad UX. But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues. Everything works really well? I can manage playlists, play on one device, control on another etc.

amboo7 13d ago

You should have tried Deezer. I had switched to Spotify because I couldn't tolerate bugs anymore.

zipy124 16d ago

It's actually crazy that a music app struggles to play music many times. By far my worst big app experience.

NaiveBayesian 16d ago

Yes, the Android app is particularly bad. For the past couple of weeks, it's gotten to a point where the app will take 30s to load on my phone. Nothing, not even reinstalling the app fixes this.

tormeh 16d ago

It's a music player, and it's way too heavy for what it does. Well, it does a lot it doesn't need to, too. Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm. Since I only have 16GB on my work laptop that's noticeable. I'd love it if Spotify AB could replace its client with a native Rust one, although using an immediate-mode GUI library like fastpotify does might not be the best option... Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. Feel like Spotify's recommendations have taken a nosedive lately, so that wouldn't hold me back too much.

shinycode 16d ago
Quite annoying when, as we see in the tv show “the playlist” that traces back the story of Spotify, the founder put a huge emphasis on performance to differentiate them from the rest and create the best possible UX…
- minton 16d ago
  Well it will only get better now that the “Code is no longer a constraint”! AI can just do everything for them now. https://youtu.be/zFslvuvYifQ?si=sEN270fkICYSpaLU https://youtu.be/zFslvuvYifQ?si=sEN270fkICYSpaLU
lostlogin 16d ago
> It's a music player Spotify doesn’t completely agree with that. ‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’ I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard. Yuck. https://support.spotify.com/nz/article/what-is-spotify/ https://support.spotify.com/nz/article/what-is-spotify/
- rplnt 16d ago
  Isn't it just another ad distribution platform? The amount of ads they started to push to paying(!) users recently makes me want to cancel it every day (but I'm also too lazy to seek alternatives).

mogoh 16d ago

Why is spotify so popular? There are different solutions to listen to music. What does spotify do that almost no one else does? Is it the music library or something else? I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).

threethirtytwo 16d ago
Another reason why they are so popular is that they were first to market. They’ve been good enough that they have not lost first mover advantage that other first movers often lose (MySpace for example)
- vostrocity 16d ago
  People often cite they were first to market, but isn't the bigger factor that they are backed by all the big music labels?
flexagoon 16d ago
For me it's mostly the big library and Spotify Jam
lirolero 16d ago
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it just works. I’ve never had any of the issues people are mentioning in this thread. The app isn’t slow or buggy for me, I’ve never had artists I listen to disappear from my playlists, and I can find pretty much every song I want to listen to. Most people I know use Spotify too, so sharing stuff is just a little more convenient.
- dgritsko 16d ago
  Yeah, this is my experience as well. It's mostly fine, and I've been using it nearly every day for years.
- laurentiurad 16d ago
  I share the same experience. I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness. The Garmin app is also really good.

BatteryMountain 16d ago

I've cancelled mine 5 years ago after they keep showing me ganster music and podcasts on my main page, even though I no history of listening or liking such content. So they keep trying to force it into my life. Secondly, they messed up the explorability of artists, playlist and related music. They also removed music from the catalogue, meaning on my playlist there are big memory holes of my favourite music, as they don't even show the artist or song name anymore. They also broke the offline-mode for when I drove my car.. so even if I switched it to offline-mode, music would still not play (after they downloaded and using 10GB+ on my phone). Then they added Joe Rogan and pushed other politics and stuff, more mainstream gangster shit. I just needed a good music player with a good discovery system and decent offline-mode. It used to be very simple. Now its a mess. So my only path/answer to this was to cancel it. They poisoned the well so efficiently that I will never trust another streaming service again for my lifetime. I hate rewarding bad business practices, businesses pushing their ideologies towards me. No thanks.

AtNightWeCode 16d ago
The problem with gangster music was a hack I believe. Spotify never admitted it but I have many friends that had that problem. I did not.
deleted 16d ago
[deleted]
lostlogin 16d ago
Their Joe Rogan period was baffling. It reminded me of Apple and U2. Apple’s boomer surprise when they discovered we don’t all like U2 was hilarious.

samcrawford 16d ago

I switched from Spotify to Amazon Music about 9 months ago, and cancelled Spotify Premium as a result (due to price, not bugs). Amazon Music is so much worse. 1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse. 2. I had Amazon Music eat my entire cellular plan's data monthly allowance in a day, after it seemingly got stuck in a loop trying to download the same podcast again and again. The podcast is unplayable when it gets in this state, even on perfect Wi-Fi, it just never starts playback. This has happened twice now (incidentally on the same podcast, but different episodes), even after deleting and reinstalling the app entirely. The second bug is a deal breaker, so I've gone back to Spotify.

dominotw 16d ago
apple music is good if you dont need it to be feature packed. best value for money if you use youtube is youtube music app that you get from youtube premium.
wombat-man 16d ago
It's always been terrible afaik. I don't know why they bother
shellwizard 16d ago
Have they replicated 1:1 Spotify's UX in Amazon music finally? I was a user 7 years ago and their Android app back then sucked, big time.
unfocused 16d ago
I switched from Amazon music after many years to Spotify, as Amazon's App was just terrible. Never worked well offline in my watch or phone (Apple). I only went to Spotify because my kids wanted it. The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.
psygn89 16d ago
I mean, Amazon just sucks in general when it comes to design. I don't understand why Amazon videos (or whatever their purchased streaming app is) doesn't even queue up sequential movies automatically. It'll play the first Harry Potter movie, then skip to the third, fourth, and then the second, etc. It's not just HP , either.

dominotw 16d ago

its run by one ceo guy gustav's whims and fancies. he is obviously not a ux expert but every feature in the app needs his "vision"

softwaredoug 16d ago

My biggest complaint is the device switching. I pick up my phone and hit play, my laptop starts playing the music .. which in turn causes my AirPods to connect to my laptop I have to go manually hunt to connect everything correctly Every. Single. Time.

deleted 16d ago

[deleted]

NothingAboutAny 16d ago

It truly has been one of the worst UX experiences and poorly made apps that ever made it to mainstream. I remember a decade or so ago there being a bunch of buzz about them in software dev because they were a microservice node.js/react stack or something with each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team. I can vividly remember thinking "oh that's probably why when I change song sometimes the album art doesn't update." they're living proof your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.

leoedin 16d ago
I worked for a startup in 2019 which was really pushing the "Spotify model" of team structure. Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. The fact the technology output of the Spotify model - the Spotify app - seemed to be kind of crap didn't seem to matter. I think the main output of the Spotify team structure was blog posts promoting the Spotify team structure.
- freedomben 16d ago
  > Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. Gross over-simplification. For anyone curious they have videos out there, though they are 10+ years old now so may no longer be accurate, but in 2019-era this was still a thing (company I worked for did it too).[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvfz4HGtoPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvfz4HGtoPc
  - stefanlindbohm 16d ago
    This video was created in 2014 and was more a description of what they strived for at that point rather than of the full messy reality. Spotify quickly after that grew larger than those ideas would sustain (without changes) and rapidly became more alike any other tech corpo. Certainly around 2019-2020 it was not like in the video by any means. Some structures or names of concepts stayed way longer than the actual practices as described. (I was active as a coach in Stockholm around this period and know multiple people, both engineers and coaches, who worked at Spotify including Henrik the author of the video.)

kingleopold 16d ago

have you tried apple music app on mac? Apple music is also wrong in so many levels I personally believe teams that work on inside Appple hate it and made so bad intentionally. There is no other explanation.

parpfish 16d ago

i'd love it if spotify split into two companies: - an enterprise platform that just provided a an API to access/play songs and direct the payment to the correct rightsholders - a consumer app that built on top of that to provide the 'spotify' we all have let a whole ecosystem of music streaming apps take off that cater to different niches of listeners. each app would be able to differentiation themselves with their UI but also features like recommendations/playlists/etc. And spotify wouldn't see them as competitors because they'd still be getting their cut because they all go through their API.

megagpt4 16d ago
Rights holders would never allow it. It would be too easy for their enterprise customer to underreport plays.

tempesttempo86 16d ago

I recently started encountering full on crashes on iOS, as well as random freezing. Not to mention whole navigation just feels 'off', like canceling navigation mid animation. Nowadays, non-native apps don't have issues like that.

duxup 16d ago

I’ll take it a step further and say I think the current music player-isms UX is just not easy to use and gets in my way of enjoying music…

hardwaregeek 16d ago

It’s a music player that regularly cannot play music. I don’t understand how you get that wrong for so long.

toomuchtodo 16d ago
They’re profitable and customers keep paying. Incentives->Outcomes.
- jtbayly 16d ago
  I canceled my subscription and moved to Apple Music
  - toomuchtodo 16d ago
    > Spotify has 777 million monthly active users worldwide, which includes 300 million paying subscribers. > Generates approximately €4.8 billion ($5.5 billion) in revenue, representing a 14% year-over-year increase, alongside a record gross margin of 33.4%
    - jtbayly 16d ago
      Oh, I know they are doing fine without me. lol But if you don’t like what they are doing, vote with your wallet. In this case, there actually are choices, which is nice.
thedanbob 16d ago
I ran sound at a friend's wedding recently and unfortunately the music was all on Spotify. Every time I tried to play a specific song from a playlist, "Spotify can't play this item right now" and it would skip to the next one (or the one after that). I ended up having to yt-dlp all the timeline-specific songs.
- BetterThanSober 16d ago
  Probably due to business/commercial licensing, I'm sure they have separate account for playing music in a public space

skybrian 16d ago

This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I’ve not noticed it being slow.

wombat-man 16d ago

I gave YouTube music a try, mostly for the free premium and I have to say, it's ok. It still hiccups sometimes when I'm on the subway or a plane but I don't miss Spotify. I do have a more pared down selection of mp3s loaded on my device in case of emergency, but I use it less and less now.

skybrian 16d ago

This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I haven’t noticed it being particularly slow either. Could it be due to having different hardware, different expectations, something else?

esskay 16d ago
> it basically works fine for playing music Until you want to play back a playlist in random order over airplay or bluetooth, then the decade old bug with thousands of replies on their forum confirming it surfaces, and it only loops the first 100 songs in the playlist. The number of bugs in their service that have existed since inception is insane. It's a buggy mess, and the UI & UX is comically poor. Not to mention the resource usage, as someone else pointed out below its incredibly insane that they think it's ok for it to be such a massive resource hog.
- skybrian 16d ago
  Okay! I never do that, though, so it doesn't affect me. This has been a "works on my machine" moment.

edgyquant 16d ago

Another annoyance is the “genres” in your liked songs. They change seemingly at random and when you select a genre eg country it has the most ass backwards way of grouping songs so I’ll get rap songs playing despite having selected folk or whatever

solarkraft 16d ago

> Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason. If I remember correctly, it has a plus on the side to add it to the playlist. Clearly different I guess (and why would you want to listen to a song before adding it to the playlist amirite?). I also love the way you have to refresh a list to get 3 new songs instead of just getting a scrolling list where you can go back.

e40 16d ago

I switched to YouTube Music and I miss the Spotify UI.

foresterre 16d ago

> - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason. There's a ton of these inconsistencies. For example, the new releases albums where songs become available over time also do not have it. It's infuriating how inconsistent the UI is sometimes. Not so long ago they also had two versions of the "swipe right to queue" UI, one with long swipe (the current one), and one with a much shorter one. I preferred the shorter (with the hard break) one because it is much clearer when a song actually gets added to the queue. What often happens when you're adding multiple songs to the queue, if you only swipe a little bit, it is unclear if it was enough to add it to the queue. With one song this isn't a problem because a message with "added to queue" is shown, but for multiple songs, the messages are shown on top of each other.

herbst 16d ago

The whole service is shit, all music you discover is bought to be there, a lot of it is AI.

AtNightWeCode 16d ago

I am a user since the beginning and had premium for almost as long. The state of the app is bad. Crash fest. They pretty much brags about that they slop code it. But was it better before? Let me give you a hall of fame of historical bugs/features. 1. Impossible to purge the play queue. Had to delete every track one by one. 2. Completely broke liked songs years after the feature was launched. 3. They broke offline mode like a billion times. Just download everything again. Especially annoying back in the days when mobile data was expensive. Still does not work like half of the time. 4. Changed to a yellow typeface! I am not even kidding. 5. Included some bittorrent like file sharing in the background.

beart 16d ago
The number of times I boarded an airplane to find my offline song list empty... I had to completely stop relying on it.

Tactical45 16d ago

I think the notion that it's the worst piece of software is a bit of a stretch here. I've used various streaming music players and Spotify has been the best by far. Doesn't mean it's perfect. I get that not all edge cases (eg swipe gestures) are bullet proof but that doesn't make it terrible software.

esafak 16d ago
WinAmp was smaller, faster, and more customizable thirty years ago.
beart 16d ago
It's objectively really bad at a lot things. I've always had the feeling that the music is not even a primary feature of their product. The last time I used it, I uninstalled once I realized that my kids could watch Logan Paul YouTube videos through the Spotify app. These masquerade as podcasts, but like a Trojan horse they are just vods of YouTube content. And at the time there was literally no way to disable this. No way to either turn off podcasts or specific content through parental controls or otherwise. I just wanted to give my kids a way to listen to music while reading. I have since switched to our local community radio station.

tyre 16d ago

They’ve left Airplay out of their Mac app for the history of the company and I have no idea why. They have hundreds of engineers. I have airplay running on a raspberry pi since 2019. The black and neon is truly a not-good choice for a UI. Nevertheless, they persist. Apple Music has a much better UX. Things like “play next” when you want to play that song next but not clear your other queued up songs are little treats that Spotify took years to catch up to. Many of the other bugs—which people document for them!—go untouched for literally years. It’s fascinating to me how companies like this ignore easy wins for their users. Have a couple engineers burn down all of those and you’ll win fans (or at least not create enemies.) Take the wins!

lotsofpulp 16d ago
The Music app on my macOS Sequoia 15.7.5 has an airplay button on the top right, to the left of the lyrics button.

ddejohn 16d ago

> Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies". I left Spotify about a year ago and have tried Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, and Youtube Music. They all have equally worse UI/UX. The Tidal and Deezer apps on Windows were absolute dogshit and would constantly bug out, randomly stop playing, freeze, take ages to load, etc. YTM's UI is awful, and it does not use your liked/saved songs and albums for its recommendations if your Youtube history is turned off, which isn't explained anywhere that I could find. Just absolutely baffling product design decisions all over the place. I'm blown away by how much all the big music streaming apps suck. Music player UIs were a solved problem 20 years ago. More and more now I'm using Bandcamp, Subvert, local music enthusiast Discord servers, and even Reddit to discover new music. It's a giant pain in the ass, but it's still less unpleasant than the apps.

veeti 15d ago
The vast support for Tidal in these discussions is pretty baffling. The whole thing is just an abandoned Jack Dorsey side hustle. Basic things like gapless playback don't work. Playback on dodgy connections is spotty. I have my own fair share complaints of Spotify UX but it actually works as a music player anywhere and everywhere.
- ddejohn 13d ago
  Eh, I had plenty of problems with Spotify too. My point was more that they're all pretty shit.

paaloeye 16d ago

100% Android version/problem. Both desktop and iOS ones are very good. As much as a hate Electron, Spotify is a pretty good example of good use of E.

JonathanRaines 16d ago

When listening to a podcast on Android, the lock screen skip-15-second buttons are reversed.