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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[Torvo]

Is there a way to rollback to a previous desktop release.  I was greatly saddened that the way I listen to my playlists has been removed.  I have a playlist with almost 1,300 songs and the sorting feature from latest added has been removed.  I have stuff ranging back to 2012 and now that is always playing first when I hit play vs. when we could sort and have it play from the latest added.
THIS IS THE REASON I HAVEN'T UPGRADED TO PREMIUM (recently) BECAUSE THE PHONE APPS WERE ALSO MISSING THIS FEATURE!!!!!  I'm not going to create a 100 song queue before a car ride to get the right order of my playlist.
Please add this feature to the phone apps and add it back into the desktop apps.

[charlieforde1]

AMEN ! already did it.had to.cant use the new one.no longer works for me
the way i prefer to listen
and i aint paying for that

[nyarasha]

I can no longer use a keyboard to filter playlists while I am trying to Add a song to my playlists.

Use case: I am playing a song, then trying to add that song to a list by hovering over my playlists and typing. See issue for video and details: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Mac/Can-t-filter-Playlists-when-adding-a-song/m-p/5191581/h...

This used to work fine a month or so ago, but now, nothing I type filters the lists. You can see for the second song that typing a space caused the playback to pause instead of searching the playlists for one with a space character in it.

I've done clean installs, and tried both the version from spotify.com and from the Microsoft Store. The latest install I have is from the Microsoft Store, version 1.1.57.443.ga029a6c4-a

Scrolling through a ton of playlists trying to find the right one to add to is wasting a lot of time - I keep up a lot of different lists. I'm on a Premium Family account if that helps debug.

[blueblitz88]

The latest update is worse than the previous UI experience.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and the user experience is much worse.

I can no longer filter the list to only show unplayed episodes of podcasts.

Podcast pages don't up load for new episodes unless I leave the page and click on the home button then go back into the page.

Overall it seems harder to do anything with no functional gains in the app. If I could I would revert in a heartbeat.

[slug_camargo]

I appreciate the reasoning behind this update, but it's one thing to use the same codebase for all platforms, and a whole other thing to basically turn the desktop app into the phone one, stripping it of so many usability options and having it display such vast amounts of wasted empty space. Phones are very limited in terms of user interaction and screen real estate, so it makes sense to make the interface as streamlined, clean and simple as possible. PCs, in comparison, have huge screens and a virtually infinite number of ways to interact: keyboard shortcuts, dragging & dropping, multiple selections, column resizing / customization, etc.

You have to take advantage of the differences. Not doing so makes it feel like your interface was designed by someone who never had to use it themselves - it's the classic issue of design vs user experience.

What we have here at the moment reminds me of what Microsoft did with the universally maligned Windows 8, and that went down so badly they had to roll back a lot of features and bring back stuff from Windows 7; ultimately coming up with Windows 10 as we it know now.