Plan
Premium
Country
USA
Device
Samsung S10e
Operating System
Android 11
My Question or Issue
As of today, I am unable to search through playlists on my phone. Yesterday playlists had a search bar at the top and I specifically used it to find a song. Today it's gone. I can search through playlists on Desktop, but I guess if I'm on the go such a level of specificity has been deemed unnecessary.
Attaching screenshots of the playlist (which I'm used to having a search bar on the top of) and the three-dot menu (which I've seen other posts where that was the location of the "Find in playlist" option)., As you can see, neither contain anything related to search. By the way, the search button at the bottom of the screen just takes you to the general search. I thought maybe they'd conflated the two for extra confusion, but no, they just hate their users.
This is super frustrating, because if a playlist is long, and if I want to play a specific song from it, I have to start playing the playlist, find the song I want in the general search, and then add it to queue, instead of being able to start listening to a specific song, and then have it continue in the playlist like any normal human being would want.
From a design standpoint, why would you get rid of this basic feature? When has anyone ever said "Thank God I can't search through this playlist and now a thing that took one click takes 3 and it still isn't as good. Boy am I glad that the top of the screen is a blank, because that search icon just sat there and made fun of me all day." Like, why would you ever get rid of a search bar? Do you have some motivation to have me listening to random songs instead of the ones I want?
I have a suggestion that the engineering team will probably love because of how negatively it will impact convenience and functionality: get rid of the pause button, and remap the volume buttons to play the next/previous song. Then, hide the volume control under User->Settings->Equalizer->Personalization->Hardware. After about 3 upgrade cycles, just get rid of it completely, and then claim you're "constantly testing out new features and concepts".