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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[New_Clear_Daze]

I feel your pain. I woke up Thursday to this mess. It's given me nothing
but headaches, and good reason to consider the Apple Music platform. Had no
warning, feeling blindsided. Live in Massachusetts, rollout seems random at
best. Sigh. What happened to "Keeping the customer satisfied"? Yikes!

[New_Clear_Daze]

It doesn't look any better on larger screens either. Large swaths of dark
nothing. We use a 55" Sony 4K TV as a duplicating monitor on the wall; the
27" desktop isn't much better. So much wasted space. Still SMH. 😟

[avaaaaaaaaaaa]

I don't normally comment on these things, but I strongly disliked this update and wanted to share some of the issues I'm having. I'm definitely not the only one voicing my complaints, as this seems to be widely unpopular, but I hope with widespread dissatisfaction being made clear, the team will consider reverting back to the old version of spotify. Here are my main issues:

1) Local files cannot be found using the search bar. I often use local files interspersed with Spotify's music and not being able to search for them is a large inconvenience that frankly annoys me a lot, since I am able to search for local files on Apple Music. Since previously local files were found in the song section of the search tab, i don't understand why they aren't there anymore.

2) Artist followers cannot be seen as easily. While listening to an artist, I would be able to find an artist's followers under their name in the "Recently Played Artists" tab on my profile. This was information that I found interesting and helped me to judge if it was likely that one of my friends had already heard an artist or if I should recommend them. While I understand this info can still be found on the artist's page, it is less accessible and less convenient.

3) Like many others, I greatly would appreciate for the full discography to be displayed on an artist's page as soon as possible. My primary way of listening to music and finding new music was starting at a random point on an artist's discography and listening from there. This new UI no longer allows me to do that, which frustrates me.

4) Allow more than 50 items in the queue to be visible. I often queue 100+ tracks at a time, and during my day, I like to look and see what I have up next - all of it. This doesn't seem to be a complicated ask, since it's just reinstating what already existed previously.

5) There is still no block button on Spotify. I've subscribed to that suggestion chain which has been open since 2013 and has over 1000 supporters. I've heard many many stories of people who are dealing with stalkers and abusers, and this app is creating an unsafe environment for them. All other large mainstream social platforms have block buttons. Spotify also needs one.

6) I personally just don't like much about this update at all. It looks much clunkier and the layout is unpleasant. I understand that the old UI can't come back for just individual folks, but the response to the new UI has been largely very negative so I suggest just scrapping most of these changes and returning the old UI for all users please.

Personally I have loved Spotify for a while. But this update took away what was special about it and made it clunkier to use than most other streaming platforms. I'm seriously considering switching to another platform.

[meow-box]

Please bring back the 'Sort By' option for podcasts on the Desktop app (please don't remove it from the mobile app)! It's essential for long-running podcasts, especially when starting a new podcast that's listened starting on episode 1. Also, it'd be GREAT if there was a 'Played' indicator for podcast episodes that were already played and finished. The podcast UX leaves a lot to be desired, but these changes would make it better!

[New_Clear_Daze]

Re: #6) The new UI looks like the mobile app enlarged for desktop use.
Awful decision. We must persevere.