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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[COMIZONE]

I was on the new update and it downgraded to its old version for no reason. I was actually enjoying the new UI. Bit weird.

[cbowe66]

From all the comments I'm seeing, these are probably the top two beefs about the changes (FYI -- it is NOT an upgrade when you make something less easy to use).  

• PLEASE bring back the search bar at the top of the screen.  It might not seem like a big deal, but there's a lot of extra mouse-moving now.  I use the search feature a lot, and it used to be convenient.  It's a pain to have to mouse left, and then mouse back  over to where the search bar was in the first place.  
• PLEASE make a separate artist column again; stacking the title and artist makes it more cluttered and harder to read.  It's super easy to sort by clicking on column headers, but deleting the artist column has forced you to create a drop-down sort feature so we can still sort by artist. 

Also, I do not care whether the desktop version looks exactly like the mobile app or not.  Making the desktop version less easy to use so that it is more in line with the mobile app is a bad call.

[ware4me]

It looks bad... lyrics font is huge, hope you add a way to resize.

At the bottom of custom playlists, I got used to see more recommended songs, now that part is gone. Why do you keep removing good features?

Do not get it.

[szdåt]

With this new desktop version, the major disappointment for me is a removal of quick way of adding albums (or any other type of release) as a playlist to a folder. I have a huge library of playlists, sorted by labels, genres, ideas etc and it is sorted as a playlist folders (which, in my case, is the only good way to manage your library of playlists).

Before the update it was possible to grab an album by its "name" and drag it to folder and it would be added to your folder.

And now this function is removed. Now, i need to manually right-click, create playlist (which will has New Playlist name) and then drag album here. And the name wont change, i need to manually rename it with artist-album name.
And when you have like 30 playlist folders and over 3000 playlists and you dig through 50-60 new releases each day, adding it for future playback - this is just insane.

First, when the limit for Library was added and everyone were forced to switch to playlist way of managing library - it was really painful. Now, when you have almost automatic system of quickly managing your playlist library - it gets removed.

For me, this is a hardcore way of making changes.

Shortly, it would be great if you will get this feature back. I dont think that i will try to invent  a bicycle for myself again this time. Especially with no guarantee that anything we will come up with will not be removed again.

Otherwise i don't see any problems with new client (speaking for myself, of course).

Best regards.

[m-elias]

Soooo it took you guys 6 months to release this memo to your users? It confirms what I already suspected but jeeze did it take you forever to communicate that. Plus:

We settled on a bold solution: focus on iterating on top of the existing Web Player codebase until it reached a Desktop-grade feature set. No, that's not bold. Bold is to release it before that solution was reached!

Now, at the beginning of 2021, we have created one maintainable codebase for both of our clients with the high standard of accessibility and speed of development we hoped for. But you didn't. Accessibility for your coders, not your users...

Long story short, you guys didn't hire staff who could handle the original code, and decided your users should pay the price for it.