Their web app functions perfectly as a replacement, however.

Maybe it is different for you, but for me the web app is flakey at best. A bug which has been a pet peeve of mine for the last 6 months: if you leave the page open for half an hour with nothing playing, sometimes all the play buttons just stop working and you have to reload the whole page before you can play anything again.

My favorite part about the desktop app is the 1 second delay between when I click a playlist and when it actually loads.

You just need to have a M5, 128gi setup to get sub 1 sec playlist loads /s

Right… unfortunately my 9800x3d and 5090 setup can’t process a 15 year old desktop app transition in under a second even though they have a coding god making all their decisions hahah

I timed how long it took to open Spotify and play a song on a $2500 Mac on low latency gigabit fiber internet.

15 seconds.

Incredible stuff.

It opens and plays music in less than 3 seconds, on my x86 NixOS box.

I wonder if the macOS build has a bunch of static libraries it has to load first.

Static libraries don't need to be "loaded first". They're part of the executable. That's why they are called static.

I had to test because I didn't recollect ever experiencing such issues with Spotify.

And no, the problems you described are not there.

On my Windows 11 laptop it takes about 2sec to start and basically any song starts in less than a second.

Maybe it's Apple making Spotify crappy on Mac to promote iTunes?

The app has gotten consistently slower, buggier, with worse UX for over a decade. In all that time, I can’t recall a single new feature I’ve actually found useful.

The app was done in 2011. They could make a massive improvement across the board with a single git reset --hard command.

I desperately miss their old XULRunner app. No longer worked through the API as of ~3 years ago and was a sad day for me.

Thank you!

You're welcome, it's great!

Do you pay for Spotify? If so, I hope you never have to experience the dumpster fire that is their free version. Half the time you select a song to play it'll just start playing related tracks.

Yeah but that's by design for the free version, it's not a bug.

their free version wasn't particularly horrendous the last time I tried. I clicked play on a playlist and got an ad every maybe 3-5 songs and the ads were usually around 30 seconds. although my main issue is that they only had the same 2-3 ads to play for me throughout the weeks I used the free version so that got annoying.

as someone on the internet once said, it's good that no-one at Spotify realised that people would buy the subscription much faster if it was a crying baby soundbite playing every time instead of an advertisement

I've gone back to the high seas and bandcamp myself. Spotify stopped having humans curate their playlists back in like 2016 or 2018 and the subsequent ML algorithms always recommend the same sounding stuff, nothing ever new or interesting. I'm back to getting recommendations in real life and literally talking to bands after their sets on who they listen too.

Never been happier listening to music ATM.

Remember their new algorithm also prefers and promotes Spotify's own tracks they don't have to pay any royalties for and the slop.

Related: https://bedrocknews.com/article/technology/2026/apr/11/ai-im... and https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/01/spotify-ghost-artists-c...

Just skip Spotify at all.

Bleak stuff

I’ve noticed sometimes my wife puts on a playlist and it’s almost like weird covers or remixes I can’t quite put my finger on. Like it has a melody of a real song but the style / tempo / vocals are changed.

It sounds like you have never used an Atlassian product, lol

Try it on a flaky connection. Every menu (maybe any action of any kind?) makes a roundtrip to the server before displaying, with a very slow timeout. It's crazy how bad it is.

I think they've gotten worse about this as an organization over the last few years(?). Earlier this year an update to their mobile app introduced loading time, and resulting slowness, for opening menus that used to be ~instant. To me that smacks of once having known not to do that, but that knowledge having been lost (or priorities having shifted).

More specifically, I'm talking about tapping the '...' on a track for the options menu. That should be latency-free, and used to be.

That specific thing hasn't been latency free for me for years.

Though I agree it should be.

Not just that, some actions spawn an entire Chromium instance. For example, any time you click on a music video (not a new thread, an actual full Chromium instance).

I’m sure more agentic coding loops will improve these inefficiencies

Are you joking? Inefficiencies like that are a typical tell for LLM-generated slop.

And I'm sure their prompt whisperers are proud of their work.

Yes I was joking

iTunes. Still in 2026