What is Spotify doing to combat decline in software quality?

[MellowMarsh]

Spotify has made it clear through some community responses that they are aware of the decline of their software quality, but it would be comforting to know what steps are taken to prevent it in the future? Over the past few weeks, we have seen some incredible problems emerge:

 - Lower quality of responsiveness of the UI

 - Removing search from an artist's page (!)

 - Removing search from a playlist (!)

 - Removing the ability to click on a playing track and jump to its position in a playlist or artist page (!)

 - Removing the ability to drag a song from your filesystem to a playlist (!)

Community compaints are increasing because of these very obvious an avoidable problems appearing in updates. However, instead of fixing them, these problems appear to be getting more frequent.

What steps is Spotify taking to avoid further decline in the quality of its software output?  It would be comforting as consumers of the service to hear some of the suggestions from internally in Spotify.

Are you hiring more QA? Are you forcing more user testing? Are you encouraging actual planning before the launch of features, including user testing and user profile creation, instead of letting devs go rogue?

Most of us have accepted that we're using a music player that can't play wav files from our hard drives, but it's hard to accept that fundamental features are getting accidentally removed with no oversight. 

[MellowMarsh]

Another update and no problems fixed. 

[MattSuda]

Hello @MellowMarsh 

Spotify has already released 2 updates since 1.0.1 and more updates will be coming.

Release notes for 1.0.2:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Desktop-Linux-Mac-and/Release-Notes-Spotify-for-Desktop-1-0-2/...

Release notes for 1.0.3:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Desktop-Linux-Mac-and/Release-Notes-Spotify-for-Desktop-1-0-3/...

[Streck0]

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@MattSuda wrote:

Spotify has already released 2 updates since 1.0.1 and more updates will be coming.

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And yet it is more than questionable whether 1.0.3 is mature enough to be released. In my opinion, the answer is a clear, capital NO.

Seriously, I cannot understand why Spotify rushed these updates as they did. Did some license for the old development platform run out or something?

[awzc]

What really is annoying is this lack of insight and customer support. All we're hearing are that there will be more updates (When? Doing what?) and that Ctrl+F will be coming back at some point (Why not now?). There has been zero response from Spotify itself (just a couple of volunteers taking the flak on the forum) about numerous issues, and as a paying customer I find this appalling. The executives at Deezer/Apple/Tidal must be laughing right now, who'd have thought Spotify would intentionally drive all their customers away without a fight?

[andyb949]

Ever since they got rid of the stars I've dreaded every new version. 

It's almost guaranteed that each update will remove a feature, either because "It turns out 99% of users didn't use it" or "We're bringing it back, we just can't say when".

And if neither of things happen, they'll still have managed to have broken something anyway, no minor how minor the update.

[Limeprom]

Also, to add to this....  broken messaging in 1.0.3:

Not true.  A large part of how my friends and use Spotify is to shre music with one another.  Not been able to share anything in this release, and frequently get this message if I try to go to my inbox.

Separate from desktop client issues, messaging has also been removed from mobile builds.  Sure, you can still share tracks, but you can't say what you thought of it or see others' responses - any text-only mesages you send from the desktop client don't appear in the mobile.

As someone above said, I too am starting to dread new releases.  Everything is changeable and unreliable.  Please - more specific release notes than just 3 bullet points.  If you remove a feature, SAY THIS - please.

[MellowMarsh]

With the latest update coming out and no improvements to the community complaints, there have been hints from the Spotify representatives that there will be layoffs in the company to combat the software decline. Can anyone from Spotify comment on these rumors?

[Streck0]

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@MellowMarsh wrote:

...there have been hints from the Spotify representatives that there will be layoffs in the company to combat the software decline.

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Interesting. I've been following the forum rather closely as of late and I haven't come across anything like that. Care to back this up with a link, say?

Anyway, unless all higher ups at Spotify have collectively lost their mind someone MUST lose their job for this mess. Seriously, I have NEVER seen such an epic screw up of a major software company. Hell, even Microsoft more or less acknowledged that they made a mistake with Windows 8 and took counter measures. The way Spotify is handling this situation is about the same quality as the 1.0.1 release.