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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[Enoril]

So i will be quick as a lot has already be said.

The Home button is not totally useless:

- Not being able to quickly find and play my previous albums/playlists is a pain in the ***

- I don't care about Podcasts propositions ! Remove that from the top

- The section "only for you" is now totally lost in the limbo of "Similar to" list

and of course the others points already mentioned before

- where is the full artist playlist now ?

- why did you remove the search field from the first panel ?

- why we have now so many waste of space in the UI ?

- where is the column Artist ? I have a big screen, you could show it when we have space for it (responsive design is not new !)

Right now, I'm installing a third party software as your desktop app is not good.

In once month, i will retry your desktop app

As you justify all these change to have better & quicker code update.... I expect a better version available...

If it's not the case and the app is still **bleep**, well I will look into your competitor offers...

Bad decisions have consequences...

[wolbass82]

Please bring back the search bar! It is an absolute mystery how anyone could want to get rid of it. It is the heart of spotify and now it's gone?

[Santayana]

Apparently, there’s no way to do this anymore.

I also miss the discography in list format.

Now you have to manually “change the record” in the player… talk about progress…

Terrible UI update from any point of view.

[outtallectuals]

For a lot of independent artists and curators, as well as listeners, the "Discovered On" tab on Desktop was an essential tool for finding playlists curated by the ever-expanding Spotify community. This feature being gone is a HUGE blow and a total silencing of independent curators by Spotify. Way to reward the community...

Similarly, in the new UI, there is a Featuring [Artist] Row that essentially serves the same purpose as Discovered On, however, it only shows Spotify's own playlists and not user-generated playlists. This is even more clear indication of Spotify's plan to only show its own playlists and not its users, despite the user playlists being a great source of discovery for fans, artists and curators alike.

It will be great to see the Featuring [Artist] tab expanded to include non-official (user) playlists as well, perhaps in a similar fashion to the About -> Discovered On section where up to 5 playlists featuring that artist are visible, regardless of whether they are Spotify or user-generated.

The new Featuring [Artist] section barely shows any content for most smaller artists, while in many cases, there certainly are many users who curate playlists that include the artist.

Spotify has always prided itself as a place where people can share playlists together and essentially championed the "playlist" movement in streaming platforms. To see this gradually move into Algorithmic and Editorial playlists will be damaging to the platform's purpose for practically all users, especially the smaller musicians and fans of niche genres that Spotify does not curate playlists for.

Please consider bringing back that Discovered On section as a part of the new Featuring section, in order not to alienate so many people in your community.

[jtor99]

(1) It's hard to believe you've now taken away one of the major competitive edges of Spotify over other services: "Discovered On" tab. That has been the primary tool for my discoveries for years - "not" editorial, algorithmic suggestions or playlists. If it's not coming back, Spotify will lose a great deal of its appeal for me. Please bring the "human element" back in this, and restore that feature. 

(2) Not being able to scroll down the artist discography at once, and having to click albums is tiresome.

(3) Why the responsive About section? Again... tiresome, time-consuming. Would love to see it without more clicks.

Long story short... Overall visually looks good, works smoother. But it has mostly taken away some essential features, those that used to account for why I liked and preferred it over other services. And replaced them with things I couldn't care less about.

I'll just wait for a while to see if there will be any improvements and the older features are restored. Otherwise, I don't really want to pay for a service that won't be as helpful as in the past, and there won't be much point in sticking with Spotify.