by ProfessorLayton on 5/9/17, 8:56 PM
Apple Music is by far the least polished Apple product I use on a regular basis (I'm on a family plan). There are so my UX problems with it I don't know where to start.
Biggest issues:
- Discoverability is awful. Playlists are ok, but heavily recommending entire albums is bizarre. Its like trying new foods by going to Costco. It would make more sense to select top picks from an artist.
- Extremely ungraceful handling of spotty cell coverage. Playback will abruptly stop to buffer, but the UI gives absolutely no feedback. The play/pause button just behaves as if I told it to stop, and is unresponsive to my input. This is especially terrible while driving, where playback can stop for other reasons (Like a bluetooth disconnect).
- Radio stations inexplicably play at lower volumes than the rest of the service. The radio tab is pretty much a giant banner for whatever Apple wants to push, instead of basing it around the user.
- Really buggy. It will arbitrarily skip to the next song in the middle of playback. Sometimes it will refuse to play a song in my library, and will move on to the next. No error, no feedback, nothing.
I could go on and on.
I really wish this was its own app on the App Store, so we could have some semblance of feedback. As well as regular bug fixes without waiting for the next iOS release.
by abrongersma on 5/9/17, 7:57 PM
Music discovery is the primary reason that I've moved away from Apple Music. It's become difficult to explore their music catalog, almost as if it's by design. I've made the move to Spotify and it's been wonderful.
by qubyte on 5/9/17, 8:36 PM
The "headshots" idea seems to be optimised for the listening habits of the author of this post. Not every artist (and almost none in my library) is a singular person. For that matter, I don't really care what the artist looks like. I'm more likely to recognise a logo when available, or an album cover failing that.
by paul7986 on 5/9/17, 9:21 PM
Apple Music is a horrid UI/UX! So confusing and way behind Spotify yet I use it everyday.
I'd love to shuffle all my songs and also have Apple Music play similar tracks to my huge song playlist. Discovering music is a chore in Apple Music. I actually have to hunt and peck through a bloated UI.
From a frustrated customer!!!
by pfarnsworth on 5/9/17, 8:04 PM
I want Apple Music to just play my fucking music. When I'm driving in my car, trying to manipulate the buttons, etc, is almost impossible and in a rage I turn it off. There is so much fucking swiping and hitting small buttons it's tremendously frustrating.
I usually listen to music in my car, as opposed to in the office, so I want big buttons and easy navigation. Does no one have an app that is designed specifically for car use?
by charlesdenault on 5/9/17, 8:52 PM
This is an incredible redesign, utilizing widely known gestures (swipes, double taps, etc). Apple should embrace these further, IMO, and a casual-use app like Music makes the most sense. I'm a longtime Spotify Premium user and I tried v1 of Music but it was jus too painful. This would have made me stay. Great job.
by nsxwolf on 5/9/17, 8:43 PM
I'm not in the Tinder generation so I don't want my music to work that way. Software should work well for everyone.
by tunesmith on 5/9/17, 9:20 PM
Apple Music has freaked me out because I have a lot of my own recordings - rehearsals, etc. After turning on iCloud sharing, it uploaded most of them, but it says others aren't available, and some of them got matched incorrectly. They say when that happens, to delete them from your source library and then re-add to let Apple match it again, since it apparently gets more accurate over time. I haven't tried that yet since it's a huge project to back up my recordings in a separate location and then re-add (even though I have the library itself backed up). The other thing I can do is cancel my iCloud sharing / match account, but then I'm not sure what happens to my recordings - even though it's my source account, I've heard horror stories about iTunes deleting some recordings on account cancellation if they've been categorized incorrectly. So I've just felt sort of stuck until I find time to do some major surgery.
by grandalf on 5/9/17, 8:25 PM
Great job on the redesign!
My biggest UX gripe with Apple Music is that the app doesn't open into the same state it was in last time I used it.
I'm not sure if this is an intentional decision meant to generate algorithmic feed impressions (or some other reason), or an oversight.
by phaed on 5/9/17, 8:02 PM
I'd say remove that first quote you have on there. No one was thinking that, but as soon as you said it, I couldn't help but have it in my mind the whole time reading the article.
by zyang on 5/9/17, 8:02 PM
I think the hoarder vs nomad analogy is excellent. Apple Music has come a long way since the hoarder heavy model, but still a long way to go before catching up to Spotify's discovery.
by fao_ on 5/9/17, 8:49 PM
> Wouldn’t it be awesome if, immediately after checking into a café on Facebook, Apple Music updates this Mood section to Focus/Study playlists?
This strikes me as being extremely, invasively creepy -- although I can appreciate that some people might find this cool.
by pducks32 on 5/9/17, 8:08 PM
I love Apple Music and he perfectly captures my frustrations with it. Beats 1 and Curated playlists are my favorite thing yet there are so many simple things I can't do. Reminders for shows. Easy navigation to shows I always listen to. Being able to add something to my library which won't work because some Curated playlist I have already have it added. I hope iOS 11 deals with many of these problems. To know that someone else shares my frustrations gives me hope that Apple does too.
by dvcrn on 5/10/17, 1:04 PM
I never went back to Apple Music after they wiped my playlists.
I used the 3 months trial and spent countless hours finding and adding all my music back. Little did I know that if your subscription is interrupted, Apple Music will wipe all your stuff immediately. I wanted to wait for the iOS10 version but as soon as i re-subscribed I just found all my stuff missing.
Other services like google music and Spotify keep your stuff in place and don't actually delete anything.
I thought this might have been a bug, but no - my girlfriend just last month switched to Spotify because of the same issue. She had to take a month break from the service and when she re-subscribed her beloved playlists have been wiped.
by pawelkomarnicki on 5/10/17, 12:43 PM
I switched to Apple Music after Google Play, and Groove (Microsoft Music), and it's most frictionless library I used so far :-) I just don't give a damn about polishing my playlists into oblivion, I just want some selection of music, put it on my phone, shuffle. Curated playlists from Apple are the best I've seen lately.
by deeth_starr_v on 5/9/17, 9:02 PM
Good for him. I cancelled my subscription with the launch of 2.0. Just awful and buggy as hell.
by tedmiston on 5/10/17, 12:13 AM
Anyone else experiencing this page crashing and force reloading every 1-2 minutes in Safari on iOS?
by cphoover on 5/9/17, 9:54 PM
Should have hired you...