There are so many hidden gems in accessibility settings, at this point it should be called advanced settings instead.

It may be the number of items that are part of why people consider these settings "hidden". The "Accessiblity" menu is now 23 items long, and the main Settings menu is 53 Apple items plus over 100 application items.

Even the most buried possible setting in iOS is 9 clicks or less, and for the bigger features usually a lot less as you've demonstrated, hence it's not correct to call it 'hidden'.

Settings then Sounds & Haptics. 16 options, none seem to match. Maybe "personalized spatial audio?" Oh no,that's saying I need special headphones.

OK it's not under Sounds. Maybe it's in the Focus section? That's what I would use white noise for, focus. 6 options. Maybe it's under "Work Focus" or "Sleep Focus"? No.

General? 15 options, all with sub-menus but none seem relevant.

Control Center? Probably not... That seems safe to ignore. Except if I selected the "Hearing" option in Control Center settings, that actually gives me access to the background noise generator in control-center. But that doesn't seem obvious to me at all.

OK next is Display & Brightness and Home Screen. Probably safe to skip. Which then brings us to Accessibility. Again, it doesn't feel likely to me that it's in here, but no other choice in the settings feels correct, except maybe the Music app? Nope nothing there.

I check accessibility. I look past 18 options and see "Hearing" again, might as well tap that option. Even "Background Sounds" doesn't match what I'm looking for mentally, "White Noise". So it's likely my eyes miss it when I scan the list of options.

IMO it's an app. So make it an app, not an accessibility setting.

It's still hidden, just in a breadth of options instead of depth. A needle hidden in a 1 acre lot covered 1cm high in hay is more hidden than a needle in a 10 ft cube haystack.

Have you ever used an iPhone as a day to day device?

A user manually checking every possible submenu to find what they are looking for would be quite an outlier. If they are that determined then I don't see what the issue is, since presumably they are then going to inspect them all anyways.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWUZ5bk6qqDSy?si=...

As well as for other colors, such as brown noise.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX4hpot8sYudB?si=...

It feels like a UI challenge as much as anything else, I can’t imagine many users specifically want a podcast. Part of me feels like Spotify deserves it though, they’ve been trying to shove podcasts into users ears for ages now and I don’t want them. Turns out if you shove podcasts in front of people they’ll choose them. Price they pay.

There is something incredibly surreal about this statement.

Spotify pays content creators based on how many ads are played.

A white/brown/pink/etc. noise track/podcast is likely to be hours long, so that listeners can have it play long enough to fall asleep. Once asleep, the listener is still technically "listening" to the track/podcast, including the ads that Spotify then must pay the content creator for. With tens or hundreds of millions of listeners each listening to hours of content, this cost adds up.

Spotify has its own white/brown/pink/etc. noise tracks that it doesn't need to pay anyone for. Those are what Spotify would like to see its users stream, because it could save them - by their own calculation - $38 million.

Beyond that, the giant media corporations whining about the fact that money is going somewhere other than their own accounts is... par for the course. Really, this entire situation speaks to the absurdity of the industry itself and its own greed.