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Everything Awful With The New Spotify Update

Everything Awful With The New Spotify Update

Operating System

Android Oreo, Web App, etc.

 

My Question or Issue

The recent Spotify Update (up to version 8.4.97.807) has made significant changes to the basic design and function of the app that will be further explained below. These changes include:

  • The removal of "Recently Played" functionality
  • The homepage for the "My Library" tab is now Playlists, which is useless for many users that do not utilize them
  • Artists must now be followed to appear in one's "Artists" list, rather than simply browsing saved songs/albums by artist
  • Removal of the "Songs" list (that displays all saved songs)
  • Excessive lag during navigation due to the attempted collection of metrics for analytics

The effects of these design decisions are as follows:

  • Removal of Recently Played: Now, one must scroll or search through all of their artists/albums to find the song or album they are looking for.
  • My Library homepage "Playlists": This is key. Let us do a thought experiment: what do I want to see first when I navigate to my library? I don't want to see my playlists (listed in order of creation rather than playback), and I don't want to see anything except the artists, albums, and songs that I recently played. This shouldn't be a "Sort artists by recently played" or anything like that, because I want to see the albums OR the artists, not one or the other based on the tab I have navigated to. Just like it was before was perfect.
  • Force artists to be followed: This is the worst design decision ever made in the history of UX. Just because I have saved an album does NOT mean that I want updates (à la Social Media) about anything that artist does. In addition, because I can no longer browse by artist (which is my main method of navigation), I must search/scroll through many hundreds of albums to get to the album I am looking for. This is much more time consuming, and it is more difficult to recognize an album name than an artist. The entire paradigm shift here is unacceptable: I have been told that I must go to every single artist page for every single artist I have ever saved, and follow them, just to have them appear IN MY LIST OF ARTISTS THAT WAS ALWAYS THERE BEFORE.
  • Removal of "Songs": The only problem with this is if I was ever forced to reinstall the app, I would not be able to quickly tell the app to download all of my saved songs (by flipping the download switch in the songs list). Instead, once again, I am forced to navigate to every album I have ever saved and flip its individual switch. Does Spotify want its customers to waste their time?
  • Excessive lag: Again, do you want to waste our time? There is no reason to have lag when the songs and albums I am navigating to FROM MY LIBRARY have already been downloaded and stored locally on the device. If I turn "offline mode" on, the lag disappears. What this means is that, instead of loading the information locally, Spotify is making some sort of web request, almost certainly to record metrics for analyitics purposes. I have no problem with this, just do it asynchronously and don't make wait 4-5 seconds every time I try to navigate. You can send your little data off to your little servers AFTER my album or artist has been loaded. There is no reason to have any lag during this process.

None of this would be a problem if the changelogs for the app were accurate, because I wouldn't have updated had I known about these changes. But instead, Spotify decides to use the same old changelog notes every time: "We're always making changes and improvements to Spotify..." This tells NOTHING to your customers, and it is done intentionally to encourage auto-updates instead of user choice.

 

I have attached screenshots of two support conversations that are very telling of how little "Spotify Cares". They are aware of these problems, they have been mentioned numerous times, and they still refuse to fix it. At the very least, an update should be pushed that simply reverts to the previous version of the app until the dev team gets it together. This would take no effort at all, but would allow me to use the app in the meantime, which at this point is completely unusable for me as every line of navigation I had has not just been buried under more submenus (or some other stupid design decision), but has been COMPLETELY FUNCTIONALLY REMOVED from the app. The artists problem also appears in the web app, further showing how the dev team went all in on this assinine design paradigm.

 

I was told to post to the community, but I know that nothing will ever happen. Just search "triple click remote for previous track Android" and you will see how many years we have been waiting for the absolute dead simplest functionalities to be implemented. Look at any thread about songs randomly becoming undownloaded (usually at the most inconvenient times, of course) to see how "uninstalling and reinstalling the app" is the answer to every issue ever.

 

Unfortunately, these new "bugs" are "features"; the app is now trash BY DESIGN. Customer support has no way to contact the dev team, which makes no sense because the entire company is based around an app and web services. What kind of customer support can exist, other than that which can directly provide information and feedback to the manufacturer of the product? But I digress...

 

This needs to be fixed immediately (though it won't) because you should care about how your customers use your app (which you don't) and because it should be understood (which it isn't) that these design paradigms are frankly idiotic and should have never been approved by ANYONE. Every single person involved in this dull-headed decision should have been fired long ago.

 

I will give Spotify 2 weeks to remedy the issue (which would take one hour to do as previously described), then I am jumping ship and will find another music service. Though I have spent many years curating my music selection on Spotify and praising the company, I will be forced to take the loss and spend MY TIME transferring all of my selections to a new service, which I will certainly tell anyone to whom I would have previously recommended Spotify

 

Keep in mind, this forum is only here to mollify the users and make it seem like they are being heard. Nothing posted here has ever actually changed Spotify in any way. They will do their own thing, even at the customer's expense, and have never, ever listened to their user's concerns. So, I have posted this knowing full-well that nothing will change, and that I will be forced to leave Spotify and join another, less appealing streaming service. JUST. FIX. IT.

 

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Reply
4 Replies

Hi,
Welcome to Spotify community. I can understand your frustration.
An idea has been posted on Spotify to bring the old UI back. I will recommend you posting your findings and thoughts there. Also, do vote it. Here is the link: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Bring-Spotify-s-old-UI-back/idc-p/4705438#M172419

Spotify's response:

 

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Thanks for proving my point... No deadline, no new information, no guarantees. Just empty talk.

I did vote and post to your thread. Unfortunately, I won't be accepting anything as a solution (which just improves their customer support metrics) until a solution is actually provided. Sorry about that... If they fix it, your post will be accepted 🙂 thanks!

Hi,
I completely understand you and it is ok. I know what you are feeling as I'm also seeing the new UI on my user. But this is something that is out of our hands. That idea is the only place where the Spotify team will publicly say what they want to do. Whether they will bring back the old UI or not. So, bookmark that idea and check it's status when you can. No idea about when they will reply, but yes it really gets a lot of votes, it does bring attention to the Spotify team. Right now that idea only has 467 votes.

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