The desktop app is also getting worse. After a certain period of time clicking play simply has no effect, so it needs to be regularly restarted.
I don’t normally enjoy these pile-ons complaining about a product, but I have the feeling it’s coming apart at the seams
I've never understood that either. I have downloaded quite a few albums for offline listening throughout the years but now I have no way of removing them because there's no listing. From time to time I still stumble upon an album marked as downloaded so I get that one chance to remove it.
So you can listen to them without consuming potentially expensive mobile data.
I finally bit the bullet last month and moved to YouTube Music. Migration was a pain but I find the generated playlists better and the UX less painful to use.
So I ended up buying a cheap Android phone ($190 USD for a very good phone - 8GB ram, 12gb space):
https://www.amazon.com/UMIDIGI-Unlocked-4150mAh-Capacity-Sma...
I use Firefox for YouTube with the following add-ons:
1. uBlock Origin
2. Video Background Play Fix add-on
This allows me to use YouTube as a background playback music player. And if needed, I use YouTube-dl to get the audio files and put them on the phone.
I have basically gone back to how I used to use MP3 players back in 2000s before streaming became a thing.
Maybe they are pivoting?
I guess they have determined it makes sense strategically. If I had to guess, podcasts and music listening are rival goods for a lot of their most valuable segments and they were worried about moves some of the new entrants in the market could have made. Might allow them to target new customers too. Hopefully more than the move will lose them in existing customers jumping ship.
This is in contrast to Podcasts, where nobody really owns the space, and they have a good shot at becoming the market leader.
I mean, I hate podcasts and wish they would go away from my Spotify, but I like the company and the music product, so I put up with it (for now, at least).
For regular use the search button is right in the middle on the bottom of the app and right next to it is the button to my library
Your criticism seems a bit harsh to me.
From breaking audio playback over bluetooth (who would possibly use spotify in the car while also using google maps! What a rare use case!) to incorrect song substitution on playlists, continuing to play audio after bt disconnect, etc. There's a 2 click guaranteed crasher in the version from a month ago on stock android on a pixel.
Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android. If I could figure out how to port ten thousand songs in a 150 playlists...
The "continuing to play audio after bt disconnect" is particularly obnoxious to me, and has been happening for something like 5 years now. The latest update has trouble just scrolling through my entire Library, because why would anyone have more than a few dozen followed artists!?!?! (I have a couple hundred, and the latest update forced artists, playlists, and albums all to list together into one enormous muddle in Library).
I bet that they all use macOS and their app macOS is really really shitty as well.
That brush with their current app I described before happened when my wife wanted to evaluate Spotify subscription as a source of children songs. We both quickly realized that youtube-dl and manually copying MP3 files to the phone offers a much superior user experience to the Spotify app.
I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their users as adults with agency, they really want to drip-feed them with "recommendations" from their glorified Markov chain. "What do you mean, 'browse the works of an artist'? No, have a 'radio station' of their albums instead."