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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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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
Juanito4

THIS Update FUC*** SUCKS. CHANGE IT BACK. Literally a useless app. There's a reason for a desktop app. So it's easy and more accessible to desktop users and you just ruined it. No one cares if it's aligned with the mobile version. I've used Spotify for almost 7 yrs now and I will certainly leave and cancel this app like everyone else if you don't fix it. 

Ghostwalker99

The version is really bad. I do not want my desktop app to look like my phone
I want it to fully take advantage of screen space. Currently I can only fit 20 songs on a 32" 2650x1440 monitor with the old version I could fit more then the double that.

You really failed again!!!!!!!!!!

photokaty

I was already sad when the previous "radio station" feature was removed from the app, but at least on the desktop I could drag a song to the "radio" button on the left menu and a radio station would be created - which I could then access from my mobile app in my "recently played" section until I listed to too many different stations and it would disappear. Now the Radio station feature seems to be entirely gone!! 😮 😞 I love spotify premium for the volume of music available, however not being able to create a station with continuous stream of songs is frustrating and almost enough to make me switch back to Pandora or some other service. Any update on this feature????

moonand6

The web version had a lot of limitations and now those limitations have been brought to the desktop client!

 

I get that things change, but I have one big complaint: BRING BACK THE SEARCH FIELD AT THE TOP OF THE WINDOW!


It might seem like a small thing, but to add one extra step every time I want to search for something is making me very frustrated.

OH-What

I see someone at Spotify has read the book "How to ruin UX 101" like every big company seems to do at some point. 

 

I can't believe anyone thinks the new desktop client is an improvement over the old one. There's so much less detail packed into the screen now, I need to scroll and click needlessly where as I didn't need to before.

  • Why do I now need to click on individual albums to see an artist's songs? It was so much better when we could just scroll and see everything, it was so much easier to explore an artist's music before. This will never be a good change. It makes it a hassle to look through an artist's discography.
  • Why does every song take up so much space vertically and horizontally? It looks like a tablet application that is for use with keyboard and mouse. It is a desktop application. I want as much information on my screen as possible without it looking cluttered, the old UI was perfect.
  • Spotify brands itself with discovery of new artists being the best on their platform, but now they've hidden "Fans also like" halfway down the page.

I don't see how these are positive changes, I understand wanting to overhaul the UI when doing the rework of the codebase and I don't want to be harsh towards the developers who spend a lot of time on this, but I don't see any of these changes being in a good direction and it's yet another application going in a frustrating direction with their UI. No friends I've spoken to thinks positively of the changes either.

I know my comment comes off as harsh and I'm sorry, but I really do think some of the changes are really ten steps backwards and are infuriating.