Ok so here's something that's been on my mind lately; Spotify is an amazing tool that has elevated the music industry into the future as well as evolved how we listen to music in general. But at the same time, it severely lacks basic almost 'common sense' UX/UI features, that a modern app (desktop and mobile should have); example:
- Ability to see all tracks at the root level of a folder of playlist
- Ability to be updated when the playlists you follow get new songs added (this used to be a feature; it showed a number of new added tracks.
- Ability to share tracks with other users within the system (this used to be the inbox feature through which I literally met my best friend and we loved sharing songs, now we are forced to create collaborative playlists and manually check those lists daily for updates if there are any.)
And this board is full of requests for deprecated features that users loved and other missing functionality. I understand that as the app evolves, people will be hungry for more and more functionality that go in unison with additional features. But that's the catch, if you are going to evolve the app, what's the point of releasing a half-baked feature which only really works if another partner feature is released with it?
As a paid customer I feel like Spotify has grown enough to not really care about posts like this because they just count the number of people who they think are satisfied (actually just no involved in these boards or even know about them, no that they are actually happy) and weigh feature development over loss of market share.
So I get it.. get the business end and the user and the hustle of both... but still being on the user side, I'm left wondering if it's time to go, or maybe fund a competitor that will take time and planning and keep the [U]ser E[x]perience in mind rather than basic requirements and profit margins.
So to circle all the way back, I realized that Spotify does offer a web API, aka ability to connect to their servers and use their framework to integrate Spotify features into your own projects. So... this would be a glorified web portal, app with a web page inside of it, but that could be optimized with modern JS frameworks to work almost as fast as a native app. Thus... why not clone the original web client, and strip it of all the garbage but add all these amazing and common sense features that all the users on this board have complained about. This would obviously be a non-profit venture but I'm **bleep** ton of people would support it via Patreon or GoFundMe, and for the extra support the dev could unlock fun features like skins, and other tiny add-ons that users may custom-request.
I'm ready to SHUT UP AND THROW MY FINANCIAL SUPPORT towards anyone willing to pick up this project and run with it, we'll call it Betterfy; I'm even willing to do the UX/UI portion of it as well as the story-boards;user flows.