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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

New update feels REALLY bad on smaller resolution screens. I can hardly navigate the app anymore. Please compact the UI for smaller windows to compensate smaller screens. I hafto scroll for miles to find my place in the podcasts I was listening to (which btw have been stuck on shuffle since the update), not to mention the fact the controls for changing viewing order for podcasts is straight up off the screen when trying to switch back to 'oldest to newest'. PLEASE fix these oversights effecting smaller desktop screens (and the podcast shuffle bug, which yes I've troubleshooted every proposed solution for that I could find on the forum)

lode_df

Nerd here. I'm missing the actual release date next to the "latest release" of an artist. Thanks for bringing that info back.

Alex180500

This update seem to have a lot of problem but I generally like the design of the new UI. Although it's TOO MUCH SLOW for  I'll stick my feedback on the new UI.

 

Mobile Version:

It should remember the last state of the library in which you left the app, it's always 1 click extra!

 

Desktop:

THIS IS IMPORTANT: Library always opens the playlists by default and it's SUPER SLOW for me with a lot of playlists, make it default the last chosen tab (albums, artists, podcasts or local) or just let me choose the default tab with a new setting

 

WHAT I LIKE OF THE NEW UI!

  • finally grid albums on mobile, thank god
  • you can search for playlists in playlist folder in desktop, thank you!!!
  • the desktop app is much faster when scrolling in huge playlist folders
  • for my main usecase (saving tons of albums, currently I have >2500 album playlists sorted by genres in folders) it's much faster than before
AMBIORIX

Hello you guys at Spotify, at the moment I'm able to run the old version, which makes me feel like I'm actually following the music releases by way of your precise date of the latest release of any artist! From the moment you will condiser to impose again the new self-destructive layout and absurd functionalities of the update, and the precise date function is not restored at that moment, I will be out of here, for sure.  And I'm not talking about one or a few clicks more or less, you know, it's pure turning back the clock and taking away the great features that we were used to explore. Perhaps soon you'll bring us back the days of the faulty lyrics to the songs? What a farce that was! At a certain time, there was also the announcement or even promise to bring that feature back. Glad it hasn't come back, because that would have been miles harder to accomplish than to simply reacitivate one field!!! I don't know what you guys are up to. What makes you so stubborn? Is it that difficult to admit that mistakes have been made? Believe me, most of us do no want to move to another platform, but would be deeply thankful and respectful if you'd consider bringing back most of the desktopadvantages of the past. Please consider listening to the thousands of unsatisfied users now! Have a good life, anyway! 

NeoMod

Hire some professional designer, really.

 

This UI is not something even remotely ready for "Beta Testing": it should be in the "Alpha" stage, and only for internal testing.