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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[A-Lexxxxus]

Is there still a way to play a discography in chronological order, like it used to be in the past? And if no, would spotify consider adding this functionality? I like to listen to artists this way.

[firebuff101]

New UI is garbage. My favorite feature was being able to double-click a playlist and have it skip to a random song and reshuffle the playlist.

It also says that all of my songs were added 1 day earlier than they actually were (songs I added this morning now say 1 day ago, songs added 3/26 now say 3/25, etc.).

[chrisblor]

Hi Dan, your update sucks and makes simple tasks like playing an artists entire discography or simply viewing a list of saved albums more complicated. I hate it

[Bondra81]

i'am really annoyed by the new spotify layout.
Everything is now way to big because it has been improved for use on mobile devices only but this makes it worse on PC. When i click on an artist now almost half of the screen is been used for the artist picture and the other half for the first five tracks - what a whaste!

Before that update the discography was sorted from up to down and had all tracks open. You just had to scroll to down. Now it's sorted from left to right and you have to click on every freakin album to open it. This is so annoying.How do i get the old look back?

And how do i remove the far right facebook Friends bar? I don't want to connect with facebook, nor do i want that space to be wasted.

About could easily moved up to the top again and fans also like to the right from the Top 5.

[dr3admann]

I've been using Spotify desktop app for more than 10 years now. It has been great to find new songs and new artists, and I've never had such a wonderful experience with music as I did with Spotify. But, after this week's update things changed drastically.

I used to find songs by browsing an artist, usually scrolling down to the artist's first album and then going up listening his/her songs and adding what I liked to the playlists. 

Now, after the latest updated, the artists songs are not in a list, and I have to click back and forth to see the songs.  It just destroyed the easy and friendly flow to listen music from an artist. 

Unfortunately, when companies get too big they start to lose their touch. And with Spotify it seems not different. In the music industry other companies went through the same process. Just look at Sony with the Walkman, and Apple with iTunes. They were leaders and had lost the touch with technology and their users. 

If I could bet, I would bet the people who decided to make this UI update to the desktop app are not heavy users of the desktop app, probably they don't create many playlists, and they don't search for new songs, genres or artists. They just don't use the desktop app in its full potentiality. So, for them it doesn't matter if the desktop app looks like an iPhone app. They don't realize that many users have a 4K or high resolution screen and a precision mouse, which became totally useless with an app that is made for a smartphone with a tiny screen and finger input. 

I really would like to have these functionalities back to the desktop app, or it does not make sense to have a Spotify subscription. 

I love to listen new music and create playlists in the desktop app. The mobile version is good to listen playlists that were made on the desktop app. 

To create playlists in this sort of mobile app that it became simply kills the experience.