I know this has been raised as an issue multiple, multiple times. Believe me, I know. I've been active on these forums since the Beta Band forum opened up a loooong time ago, and I've been a fervent Spotify Premium member, and extremely vocal supporter, since you guys came to the United States. I was there from Day 1. **bleep**, I've even applied to work at Spotify (NY, SF, Sweden) multiple times as an Android Engineer, way too intensely probably, using my own project of reverse-engineering your Android app (via APK decompiling), re-writing it with my own re-imagined UI, and re-compiling to a working state, to use as my portfolio. (Shameless GitHub plug goes here: https://github.com/ShotSkydiver/SpotifyRedesign)
My point is. I've been there from the beginning (in the US) with you guys, and I spent over eight months in 2017 trying my hardest to get hired as a mobile developer at Spotify because it was all I wanted in a CS job. I say all this to provide a backdrop for this: please for the LOVE OF GOD. I know you've been A/B testing the change back to partial albums (aka individual songs from an album or EP) appearing in your Albums list, and vice versa. I mean, goddammit guys, I remember your gradual A/B introduction of ditching the partially-saved-albums-appearing-in-the-albums-list in favor of the implementation we still have/(had?) today. That happened almost three years ago, and it, for lack of a more subtle description, **bleep** me the **bleep** off. I was so used to the original system. But I got over it. I was annoyed for a while but I got used to the new logic. I save X, it saves in songs, I save all of X in album X, it goes in albums. Okay cool, got it, I'm fine with it by now for sure.
So what the actual **bleep** are you doing by suddenly now switching BACK to the old system? I am the absolute least vocal and/or aggressive person in the world, like, to a fault, in fact social confrontation scares the **bleep** out of me, so this is very out of character for me :c
But this.... I mean WHAT THE **bleep** PLEASE GOD AT LEAST JUSTIFY YOUR UX CHANGES IN SOME WAY
You have completely broken FIVE YEARS of my personally curated music, since literally Day 1 when you introduced the concept of songs that are 'saved' by a user being *actually* saved in a new view collection called "Songs"
It sounds trivial and discardable, but I've been progressively saving songs, or albums, I come across or am told about, since 2014. So, (and maybe I just am weirdly too attached emotionally to music), I've built an emotional connection to any given part of that entire list of my saved songs, AND JUST AS (SEPARATELY) IMPORTANTLY, my list of saved albums. I can scroll to any random point of both lists and feel nostalgic towards that period of my life. It's how I define a lot of important events in my life, but y'know what, that's not even that important. If that was all that your change affected, I would be mildly/moderately annoyed, but would never complain or post.
My issue is that uh, hey uh, that saved albums/songs behavior change that you guys just decided to randomly switch to, AS A SERVER-SIDE CHANGE, uh yeah well it BROKE EVERY SINGLE ALBUM I HAVE EVER **bleep** SAVED SINCE YOUR INCEPTION OF THE 'SAVED' DESIGNATION IN 2014.
I almost never get mad or annoyed because it makes me feel guilty about myself, but this..... this affects me a lot. Just. I'll put an end to this **bleep** 5-paragraph college critical essay**bleep** this is actually more than 5 paragraphs whoops)
You have broken five years of music history for me. That's the most important thing in the world to me. I trusted you, inherently, that no matter what crazy A/B tests you did, the priority was always placed on preserving the user's existing data. I even have seen your flags that you conditionally set for myself firsthand, because I know your Android source code inside and out by now.
But this is so so devastating. You've destroyed my entire library that I've built, and I'm so afraid that it's now permanently broken in your DB, that even if you wanted to, you wouldn't be able to restore my (and all of our) saved songs/albums links back to previous behavior. Unless you have some previous builds that you can recover from your auto-build bot, or unless you have some time-machine esque DB files, I don't know... I hope I'm wrong.
Just please, at the VERY LEAST PLEASE THIS IS ALL I CARE ABOUT MORE THAN ANYTHING. Is this fixable. Can you at least access the connections between a user's Library and their saved Albums and Songs, from before this recent change?
I can't access any of my saved music in my Albums list that was saved before the date of your serverside flipping of this feature switch. Which dates back to..... let's see, oh okay that was easy, it was February 1, 2019.
I can get used to the convention change. God knows I have before. But please. **bleep**ing please. Either tell me if it is programmatically possibly to salvage my PREVIOUS FOUR YEARS OF SAVED MUSIC THAT IS IMPORTANT TO ME EMOTIONALLY, or tell me it isn't. I'm fearful that it isn't. If you or your iOS/Android Dev teams have more questions, tell them whatever you want. I don't want to work at a company like this, who so carelessly destroys the years of data a user has built up.
Please. I can scroll to any previously-saved album and it will navigate to a new TableVC, with "nothing saved for this album". I know you know the issue. It's all over the Community forums. Every Spotify Alpha update I receive on my iOS device via TestFlight, I eagerly install and open immediately, in the unrealistic hopes that maybe *this* beta release fixed this OBVIOUS PROBLEM. Please. It actually really is emotionally painful. I track my music playcounts obsessively via Last.FM, and I have since 2010. Your platform is the ONLY one to still natively support scrobbling. Not to mention something equally, if not definitely more, important to me: your music recommendation algorithms know me, and what I like, to a **bleep** T by this point. And they are SO **bleep** GOOD. The number of artists I've discovered via Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and even the Ones That Got Away lists.......
I've been meticulously feeding and sharing all data that I can to Spotify for almost eight **bleep** years now. So between that, and my absolute obsession with... (this next sentance turned into its own compound beast, so I'm retroactively adding in these parentheses) your brand, your company culture, your absolutely stellar Design and Engineering departments and their respective Twitter accounts (do I even need to say that of course I follow them), and (there's way more but I'm too annoyed to recall them).
Just... please. At least tell me if it isn't possible to salvage those previously saved artists and slongs. Or, god, better yet, tell me this is a server-side switch that functions more like a formatter, rather than a parser.
Just tell me something. Just don't say this is a change that has been decided on. Becuase it sure feels ubiqutious by this point; I've downgraded multiple iOS and Android devices even as far as pre-8.4X, and no it's clearly server-side. Even the much-less loved macOS/Win clients see this change.
I don't want to leave to go to a different steaming service. God, I do not, more than anything in the world I do NOT. But with what you've done to my library, well, it literally has felt like I've been starting over from scratch. Just tonight, I was in the mood for an artists' album I had previously listened to last week. AFTER the change. So that album was in my Recently Played. BUT, oh wait, I had previously Saved that album to my ALUBMS library when it released a year ago, so even navigating to it from the separate Recently Played list results in the "You have no saved songs" screen!
So that's what I mean. My 'new' Spotify library has been around since Feb 1, and I have more than begrudgingly saved things to it. The biggest slap in the face is when I navigate (manually of course, via Search) to an artist I love, go to one of their Album views -- for an Album I had previously saved, mind you -- and OH WOW WHAT A SURPRISE it's marked as having NEVER BEEN SAVED
Like I said, it feels like I'm being forced to re-build my entire 5 year library literally from scratch, starting from three hecking weeks ago.
oh and also uh yeah heck u, all your previous five years are broken and un-navigable, BUT they are all still completely visible, so it looks like it's all normal! but all you can do is be hecking taunted by their fake existance
The point is, if I'm stuck feeling like I'm forced to start rebuilding my music library from scratch (because I LITERALLY AM BEING FORCED TO), then why not take this opportunity to maybe switch? Idk apple music does honor my "current student discount" still (it's not at all current it's just my old student id)
I'm not at all saying that garbage nonsense as some tactic or whatever, I just genuinely feel that way, and it sucks and I hate it, because I don't WANT to use anything but spotify, I don't WANT to switch
(also lol no thx apple music u suck)
but at the same time.... what choice am I left with?
So please. I'm just, at a VERY MINIMUM, asking for one question from the iOS Dev Team. First of all Hi. I obviously a fan. I absolutely LOVE the new Canvas view, and I love the Title/Subtitle left justification that you just introduced today with TestFlight build 849700001, it's an adjustment for sure but **bleep** if I don't love it
idk I like the previous center justified because of course, but this left justified, I'm a fan, it really draws your eye, so hey shoutout to the iOS UI/UX wireframing/design phase team
(maybe increase the pt size of the headline/subtitle labels (textviews? I haven't dissected the iOS app in a few years) to draw from the convention of Apple's Large Headers iOS 11 navbar headers? but like... 22pt instead of their insane 38+pt
I'm getting distracted again. your front AND backed platform frustrate the **bleep** out of me because there's so much that 1. HAS been changed and should not have been changed and 2. SHOULD be changed because wth why does it exit
but
regardless of all that, none of heckin matters if something doesn't change.
I don't think I'm asking for much. Just at the stupidly bare minimum, a reasoning behind the change, and a simple Yes or No in regards to the ability to recover albums saved prior to the change
But even though that is in fact something at least, it's not anything. Just either fix the saved issue if you can, or remove all albums saved by that user prior to Feb 1 2019. Let's just start there. (Also, don't **bleep**ing choose option number 2, it's so insulting and lazy.)
Okay. I am very excited for someone's response.
And scared.
( family memberships have no weird quirks when being canceled right)
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random