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The New Desktop App

dan

UPDATE - May 5th, 2023

Hey folks,

 

We appreciate the feedback you've provided us with regarding the new desktop UI; it's being taken into account!

We're chiming in to redirect you to the current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 


Thanks!

 

UPDATE - April 16th, 2021

Hey folks,

 

We've tried to cover most of the frequently asked questions concerning the new update in this Spotify Answer - Make sure to check it out!

 

We'll continue to go through all your posts in this blog, so if you have any other questions besides the ones in the FAQ, feel free to add them in a comment below.

 

Thanks,

The Community Moderator Team

 

UPDATE - April 8th, 2021

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday we published a blog post on our engineering blog which goes into more details on the new UI, the reasons behind it and the process of building it.  If you'd like to read a few more details like that you can check it out here.

I'd also like to mention a few things coming in upcoming versions of Desktop

  • We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI.  We expect this to land in an upcoming release, so do watch this space and make sure you remain fully updated.
  • "Discovered On" playlists for artists will be back in an upcoming release.
  • We're working on bringing to Desktop the ability (like in our mobile apps) to see all the saved songs by a particular artist from within the artist page itself.  Again this will be arriving in an upcoming Desktop release.

Thanks,
Dan

 

ORIGINAL POST -----

 

Hi everyone

Dan here from the Desktop team again. I wanted to make another post to once again thank you all for your continued feedback, and also give a little more detail about what we’re doing from here on in.

 

In short, the new user interface is the future of the Spotify Desktop client, and over the coming weeks we’ll roll out the new UI to all Desktop users. Many of you will have noticed already, but we’ve based the new experience on the more modern and scalable Web Player codebase, and in doing so made both versions more aligned and easier to use than ever before.

Why are we making this change?

We believe in the future of the Desktop platform and want to make sure it can still serve the needs of our users now and into the future. 

The existing Desktop UI codebase became increasingly hard to maintain as time went on, and you may have noticed a growing gap between the Desktop and Mobile apps in some cases. For those of you interested in the technical details, a blog post on the engineering blog is coming soon. The short story, however, is that our desire to continue pushing Desktop forward and bringing new features to it became incompatible with the reality of maintaining the legacy experience.

 

Meanwhile, we had a Web Player serving similar user needs, but built in a much more modern and scalable way — with a more cohesive Spotify “look & feel”. We therefore resolved to use the Web Player UI code as the basis for both Web and Desktop in the future, and have been spending quite some bringing the Desktop-class features that you’ve come to expect to this shared platform. You’ve had a sneak peek of this as we’ve been testing and building things out, so once again I’d like to thank you for both being a part of it and giving great feedback on this thread that has definitely helped us improve.

Benefits of this approach

Firstly, I’d like to say that this really is a new beginning for the Desktop app. Long-term Desktop users will start to notice more rapid iteration on the app than they’ve seen in the past.

 

I’d like to call out some of the things in the new Desktop, and also give you a little taste of what’s to come.

 

Design - We’ve focused on consistency, are using more color to enhance the experience where appropriate, and are making better use of cover art and album images in the app. We're also better aligned to other platforms, put an increased focus on accessibility, interactions and animations, and have tightened up our design language, so it’s more in line with what users have come to expect from Spotify.

 

Functionality - We’ve brought the functionality that users expect from Desktop, like sorting/filtering, drag & drop, and advanced settings and options, whilst improving areas like playlist creation and curation, profile pages, and more. In many cases these improvements have landed in the Web Player, so the work here has benefited our combined users on both platforms.

Tip! You’ll also find new keyboard shortcuts for many tasks (press ctrl+? to see them) which makes certain actions much faster and easier for any user.

We are also aware that there are a few aspects raised in the community that haven't been fully addressed as part of this update, but items like the Search Bar and discography on artist pages have ultimately been brought closer in line with other Spotify applications. That said, we will continue to iterate on the experience across both platforms moving forward.

 

The future of Desktop

As mentioned above, this change to the Desktop UI gives us the ability to move faster in bringing you new improvements, features and functionality — so you can expect to see continued improvements to the client in the weeks and months to come.

 

Once again, I’d like to thank you all for helping us shape the Desktop App over the past year on behalf of everyone here at Spotify, and please do continue to post your feedback and use our Ideas section here in the Community to tell us what you’d like to see and why.


Thanks again,

Dan

2,290 Comments
werepancake

Why did you remove the "Discovered On" feature?? How are independent playlist creators supposed to have their playlists found? All I see on Artist pages is the "Appears On" list which is EXLUSIVELY Spotify playlists. You've removed a huge part of the Spotify community which was a great way to share and find new music.

 

Also, it seems that the "About" tab has been completely removed for artists that haven't added a description to their page. This means it's no longer possible to see how many followers they have or what cities they're listened to in. Removing the follower count from the "Recently played artists" page also means there's no way to get follower counts at all. This is an important feature for artist-community engagement!

Example: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5FxIHlAwrVLGORZZj7B8sN?si=-kSMoO1STcWZvhiGYpNwrg

rpurban

I must have gotten bitten right as this update was happening.  I was working on configuring local content on my windows 10 desktop.  One minute I was able to point at my extensive iTunes library and then suddenly I have 3 on-off switches under Local Files but only one of them (Downloads) is actually labeled.  Wasted 3 hours trying to figure out what went wrong.  Looks like it was this update that has left me high and dry.Screenshot 2021-03-25 114637.png

seantnichols

While I am for future proofing software, this release has not been fleshed out. As many others have mentioned, there are several things missing that we previously had (and what made desktop so incredibly useful).

 

Playlists:

- Artist column is gone. Why? This is a basic function of any music player. Additionally having the artist name below the song title is cluttered IMO. 

- Date Added column is gone. While many people may not use this, I use it constantly. It helps me keep track of when playlists have been updated, I also use it all the time for building my own playlists. 

 

Solution: Put in an option to add/modify columns. Yes I am aware of the sort drop down, no it doesn't help me. 

 

A long standing issue I've had with Spotify on mobile particularly, which I hope hasn't carried over to desktop, is that Shuffle on an artist page is broken.

 

When I go to an artist page and shuffle play, 9 times out of 10 it only shuffles their Popular tracks, not their entire discography.

 

Way back in the day you could view all songs from an artist and shuffle them, now the best you get is a discography page where you can shuffle individual albums. 

 

What this means is that I have to manually build a playlist for every artist with their discography so I can manually shuffle it.

 

Solution: Simple, either bring back a full track listing page for artists OR fix shuffle so it actually shuffles all their songs and not just the Popular tracks.

 

What I would love to see right now is the ability to roll back to the previous UI while the new UI gets a little more polishing done. 

daaveh

Hi.

 

So I read this morning about the new updates (desktop/web). I launched the app, did not see the little blue update dot in the corner, so I downloaded an installer from the site. Launched after installation and it looks exactly like the old version. Went to the web player and can see the new interface there, but not on this MacOS Mojave desktop.

 

Uninstalled using AppCleaner, reinstalled, changed nothing.

 

I suppose if I don’t even see the new interface then the new features are also lacking? How can I remedy this?

 

Thanks.

17341057

Hi Dan,

As many above I'm constantly using Spotify and the new updates have unfortunately made accessibility and efficiency a lot worse.
-The removal of the search bar from the top page now requires an extra click to the search page, which sounds like not much but for how often it's used this is impossibly inconvenient.
-Removing the artist column and putting it under the track name clutters the screen and makes navigating music a lot less convenient and straight forward. Also that crucial column's space has just been spread out across the row with no function, I guess to reduce the clutter from putting the artist under the track name.
-Rows now have a unnecessary amount of empty space around them, which means more scrolling and more empty space. The previous design was much more efficient, organised and navigatable.
- It seems everything is blown up in a similar way to large text mode on iPhone which is great if the person using it is elderly and can't see very well or have trouble pressing the right spot on the screen, but this is not necessary and shouldn't be addressed across all users on a desktop version of the app.

Very disappointed, like the majority it seems.