Re:How Spotify builds products [pdf]
by Dewie on Friday December 27, 2013 @06:08PM
(#6973041)
I find the Spotify Android app to be a pain. I just opened it and it took literally around 15 seconds to show my playlists. I kind of have a good amount of playlists, but that is basically the only way I've found to keep track of things I want to listen to with the exception of starring (so yay for having an unholy mess of playlists for which there doesn't to be anything like filtering or what have you for actually dealing with a large amount of playlists manageable). And there is no obvious way of having different playlists for mobile and Desktop/browser, although I only want some playlists for mobile so that I can use them offline. Some times it also takes literally 30 seconds to load a playlist that I've selected, and up to 12 seconds from starting a song until it actually plays. There is also no way for me to turn off 3G streaming SPECIFICALLY, so it's either offline mode or I have to be careful not to play a playlist with some offline tracks if I happen to not get WiFi unexpectedly for some reason (and WiFi goes out unexpectedly and without warning because wireless is volatile like that, plus no app ever will tell you that you have no WiFi specifically, it will just say "No Internet"). Also a lot of nuisance with Spotify claiming that I'm "offline" when I know that I clearly am not, though that has gotten a lot better. Desktop Spotify is totally fine, though. But right now I'm really craving going back to a 16 GB iPod Nano when it comes to listening to music wherever I want. Downloading and "undownloading" and the clusterfuck of playlists is just a big hassle for something that is supposed to be a lot more convenient than an mp3 player.
They also used to have a horrific splash webpage with autoplay IIRC, but thankfully they seem to have changed that.
Maybe there is some obvious way to fix all of this such as by reinstalling the Android app (did that about half a year ago I guess) or googling (though I've been mostly dissapointed when googling issues, ending up at the Spotify communit/support forum and basically finding out "yeah that's not possible/you have to do this tedious work-around"), but I mostly wrote this because I saw the opportunity to vent, so...
EDIT: Also, when I first wanted to use the browser version, the actual webpage/URL for the player was so hard to find it was almost as if they tried to make it a secret on purpose. But I'm happy that there even is a browser player in addition to the desktop app. And the Linux version of the Desktop app is very good (on Ubuntu at least) so I don't need to use Wine.
They also used to have a horrific splash webpage with autoplay IIRC, but thankfully they seem to have changed that.
Maybe there is some obvious way to fix all of this such as by reinstalling the Android app (did that about half a year ago I guess) or googling (though I've been mostly dissapointed when googling issues, ending up at the Spotify communit/support forum and basically finding out "yeah that's not possible/you have to do this tedious work-around"), but I mostly wrote this because I saw the opportunity to vent, so...
EDIT: Also, when I first wanted to use the browser version, the actual webpage/URL for the player was so hard to find it was almost as if they tried to make it a secret on purpose. But I'm happy that there even is a browser player in addition to the desktop app. And the Linux version of the Desktop app is very good (on Ubuntu at least) so I don't need to use Wine.