[Mobile] [Other] Smart Shuffle toggle setting in settings menu

[LiamTems]

Smart shuffle is a fun way to discover new songs, but it comes at a cost. Want to reshuffle your queue? Bam, wait a few seconds longer. Want to unshuffle your playlist? Bam, no longer works, and goes to a completely random place in the playlist.

To me this is an unwanted complication, and I'd much rather be able to choose in the settings menu whether I want to enable the Smart Shuffle feature, or disable it.

[RobertGoslingJr]

It's hard to ignore the possibility that Spotify is using the Smart Shuffle feature as a way to promote paid advertisements, such as artists paying for more visibility. Or at the very least intend(ed) to with something similar in mind. It's puzzling that this feature, which likely wouldn't take more than 10 hours for development, refinement, and QA, hasn't been implemented yet.

To me it highly suggests that internal politics are simply influencing the decision. While developers, UX designers, and most team members probably support the feature, there are likely others with more influence who are blocking it. And of course, none of this is surprising, this is just how companies (more often than not) end up.

BUT let's be hopeful and cross our fingers for having this done in 2024 🐢💨

[lovuline]

spotify, are you here? came back after 1 1/2 year to give feedback and realised, that I already wrote a comment last year.

Absolutely can not believe that after almost 100 pages of mostly negative feedback they still ignore us. guys ... 100 pages of negative feedback: this is just a smaaall, little little part of people, which took the effort of loggin in and writing a comment. imagine please, how many people are fricked up with this feature and maybe switched to an other streaming services or who are day by day annoyed because of this feature. we just want to be able to disable it in the settings. please. please.

[saṅgīta]

As a follow up to my previous post concerning Spotify choosing to insert random songs into our personally curated playlists, here is a quick, side-by-side compare+contrast of the icons used, on the mobile app, for iOS. The icons for 'smart shuffle', 'smart shuffle-disabled regular shuffle' and 'play in order' are 5mm wide. The ONLY distinguishing characteristic of the 'smart shuffle' icon and the smart shuffle disabled icon is a 1.5 mm star in the upper left corner. Same shape, same colour. This is not an accident. It is right out of the 'dark pattern' playbook of UX/UI design. They've deliberately selected an essentially indistinguishable dot, to 'differentiate', knowing full well this will lead to confusion in user behaviour. Further, they 'glide path' user adoption of 'Smart shuffle' by setting it to 'ON' by default. The user must therefore, 'disable' it, and as previous stated, with a singular, 1.5mm graphic distinction, this is unlikely. This behaviour is sus af.Spotify-SNAFU

[yunopayne]

I totally agree. The smart shuffle feature should have its own button or be able to be turned off. It’s really annoying to have to skip past smart shuffle just to use regular shuffle, especially with the extra delay. Regular shuffle should be easy to use and not hidden behind extra steps. 

[Moo736]

Begging for this to be fixed as it somehow disables local file songs from playing, with no availabe fix expect connecting back to the computer you downloaded from.

[gcgaeke]

Seriously?! How long does it take you to make Smart Shuffle a user-chosen option rather than the default? Are you listening to your customers? Over 800 complaints about this already. Here's another one.

I spend a lot of time choosing MY music for MY playlists. What in heaven's name would make you think that I would want to listen to crappy choices made by AI? 

[TamlinST]

Please provide a way to disable smart shuffle, it's a crappy "feature" and I don't want to ever use it, ever ever ever.  Please provide a way to disable it or I'll need to find a new music service to give my money to.

[TamlinST]

Wow, a year and 6.5k votes and still nothing, what an amazing customer first company that really cares about the end user experience.  Please provide a way to fully disable Smart Shuffle so I never need to be annoyed by it again, it's a bad idea and forcing it upon your users in this way really sucks.  Just make another damn button for it.

[brushfe]

I get that Spotify benefits from people playing more new artists, but forcing this on people—knowing how easy it is to make optional—is so obviously one-sided and corrupt.

Let people opt-in to all new features. If they're good, people will use them. You don't need to erode people's love of Spotify to get your numbers up.

[nuralmhithawi]

This is a great idea, when Spotify introduced the smart shuffle I was a bit confused and didn't know when it would be on or not!