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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[theguywithcheez]

I held off on posting for a while to see if anything would change, and it hasn't. There have been no noticeable fixes to known day 1 issues for weeks and this is getting frustrating.

First off, is there a way to be removed from this forced beta testing? My Premium subscription doesn't exist so I can have the pleasure of beta testing unfinished software that's full of bugs, I want to use something that actually works.

Issues I am having;

Regardless of what I do, podcast playlists are always sorted in an absolutely random order with no regard to episode number or release date every time when navigating to the list. This appears to have been known since day one of this forced beta but it has yet to be fixed.

When skipping using the + or - 15 sec button with podcasts, the play head will skip by 10-30 seconds in a random direction. Same thing happens when clicking in the bar to skip forward, it almost always goes to some time before where the playhead was.

Just general UI issues, the "beta" layout is terrible. The biggest gripe being the search bar, oh wait sorry, the search button, then the search window. Why was that even changed? Useless extra click to save zero UI space.

Why remove the listed discography view? That was one of the best things about using Spotify, now its just totally gone and has been replaced by a really crummy poorly designed list that doesn't even show all discography requiring yet ANOTHER click to see EPs etc.

Why move the artist name UNDER the song title? Literally no one sorts music like this, and having to click on the song title sort 3 times to sort by artist is just stupid.

These issues and many others have been known for over 2 months now, but nothing seems to have been done. If this continues, I will be cancelling my account and moving to a different service, this is getting ridiculous.

Again, is there a way to remove myself or be removed from this stupid forced beta update list where random users are chosen and forced to beta test your unfinished software? I don't pay for a subscription to have a beta test forced on me. I can't believe someone thought this was a good idea to implement. Why not have a beta opt in feature like almost every other desktop software? Steam has had this function for YEARS.

[Medina33]

Let's face it... Spotify —as we know it— is dead. No more real Music discovery, no more room for Playlist creation, no more Artist discography display, no more Search bar, no more handcrafted original playlists made by Users..

The reality is: Spotify is now a big stinky radio station.. They want us to listen to commercial music on shuffle and on repeat, selected by the stupid algorithm. They want to spoon-feed us their "top songs", which make the most money for the Company whilst maximizing its revenue.

Users: We deserve a better user experience

Spotify: Nah. It's all about the money, honey.

Users: Bring back the previous UI. Please, we beg you!

Spotify: Go away pesky power-users. We're running a multi-million business here. Don't like it..? Put your finger in your shuffle button. OH YEAH.. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle and shut up!

[starseeker-]

The new forced UI is clunky and looks like it's made for touchscreens, while obviously being a desktop app. Why would you change the list view? Why make everything look bloated and big? Why move the artist label UNDER the title of the track, and not its own column? Why remove the list view of all the songs of an artist on their page and make listening through the artists music even harder?

So many weird anti-user choices for the sake of a "sleek" UI, which clearly failed.

Give you a month or two and I'm switching to Tidal or Amazon Music. They might not have a much better UI, but you surely do not listen to your users, and thus do not deserve my money.

[datsunlaurel]

I seriously hate this new UI, there is so much to complain about, but I don't understand all the complaints about the search bar. Yes, the old search bar was visible at all times, but it still required one cursor click before you could enter anything, just like the new search function. To me there is no difference. Or am I missing something?

Anyway, the new workaround is working fine for me so far, though I'm afraid it won't be long before they find a way to spoil this too. Thanks to everyone who posted this and to the guy from reddit who came up with this and to the other guy from reddit who posted how to prevent the login on every restart. 

[rednblu]

Glory be to Reddit!