Nice technical read, but to be honest, the moment I find another app that does what I need I will gladly leave Spotify behind. Apart from the general slugginess of the app, the number of features that have been removed over the last couple of months is staggering. Just some examples, in case someone from Spotify in a position to fix this is reading this:
* Searching in playlists was removed
* Searching in local files was removed (and the local file support has always been crap anyway, please work together with Last.fm to properly match files)
* Creating a new playlist in a folder was removed (you now have to create and move the playlist)
* Sorting playlist folders was removed.
* The option to turn off your 'volume normalisation' was removed. Because your algorithm is really broken and severely compresses the music, removing any dynamic range, this is the biggest showstopper for me. Check your forums, tens if not hundreds of people already left because of this.
* Apps were removed (tbh, I can live with this)
Oh, another one, please give us an option to turn off 'Spotify Connect'. It prevents my Android phone from entering deep sleep, and thus it is a battery drain. You don't need to fix the battery drainage, just give me an option to turn the feature off.
Yes its a shit-show. They even had a (hidden) working equalizer in the OSX version, but decided that this too was a feature that should be removed.
I still have no idea how to find a specific album in an artist's page, but of course that is a minor concern, compared to their ability to "to work with whatever frameworks they need, without the need to coordinate tooling and dependencies with other squads".
The one thing Apple got right is to always optimize for user experience, never for engineering convenience. Native code, no garbage collection - still pays off today.
What would be a good cross-platform tech stack that satisfies those needs, and isn't C++? Anything with a QT binding I suppose?
This is driving me crazy. I managed to stumble across this feature via cmd+f one day and as quickly as I find it, they remove it. Seriously?
The only way this feature could be used was via a keyboard shortcut, it wasn't a something cluttering the UI or adding additional cognitive load in a menu for a user - and it was damn handy.
The day where the update removed this feature I wanted to find the product manager at Spotify and yell WTF at their face.
I believe that the main reason for not being able to disable 'Spotify Connect' is that the functionality is being used to prevent people from sharing Spotify accounts. This became particularly clear in the last version of Spotify when they made it impossible to set the Spotify client in 'Offline' mode if the phone was already connected using 'Spotify Connect' (the 'Offline' setting is being grey out). Now you have to set the phone in 'Flight mode' and then start up the Spotify client and set the Spotify client to 'Offline' mode (and then disable 'Flight mode' if you want to use Internet while listening in 'Offline' mode). So my guess is that they will never make it possible to disable 'Spotify connect'.
Starring songs was also removed and individual songs you "Save to Your Music" get bundled in with every song from every album and artist you've saved or followed and the songs from some playlists it seems. It's a complete mess.
Spotify connect is the most frustrating problem for me. I use it at work on my laptop and it drains the battery on my phone, tablet and my partners phone (as we share an account).
* Searching in playlists was removed
* Searching in local files was removed (and the local file support has always been crap anyway, please work together with Last.fm to properly match files)
* Creating a new playlist in a folder was removed (you now have to create and move the playlist)
* Sorting playlist folders was removed.
* The option to turn off your 'volume normalisation' was removed. Because your algorithm is really broken and severely compresses the music, removing any dynamic range, this is the biggest showstopper for me. Check your forums, tens if not hundreds of people already left because of this.
* Apps were removed (tbh, I can live with this)
Oh, another one, please give us an option to turn off 'Spotify Connect'. It prevents my Android phone from entering deep sleep, and thus it is a battery drain. You don't need to fix the battery drainage, just give me an option to turn the feature off.