[danShumway]

This would still (often) be strictly better than having those same users complain that there are no clients that do what they want.

It's also an easily solveable problem if the APIs are actually open. If Apple put out three music clients, you would definitely get people complaining that they weren't unified. If Apple shipped an open iOS API that covered everything in their official client(s), somebody in the community would just build one client that did everything a complaining demographic wanted, and then sell it for $4.99 on the app store.

When you see large groups of people complaining about current tech offerings for sustained periods of time, that usually means that the legal and/or technical barriers to entry to build alternatives are too high.

[azinman2]

Apple does have a public API for Apple Music [1], as does Spotify [2]. In fact, I frequently use a 3rd party client [3] that's all about curated music leveraging the Spotify API to stream the tracks.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi

[2] https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/

[3] https://noonpacific.com

[danShumway]

I can't speak to Apple (I'm on Android), but I did look into 3rd-party clients for Spotify at one point and my impression was that the web API only allowed you to get information about songs, and remote-control the official client. The advice I saw online was LibSpotify was basically dead and that Spotify was probably going the same direction as Twitter: more locked down, more onerous developer TOS, fewer capabilities.

I'd be pretty happy to be wrong about that, since I'm fairly annoyed with Google Play. At the time, if I had found good enough API support and a good enough 3rd-party client, I would have switched services.

It's been a while since I looked into it, and maybe I missed something when I first did. I can see that Spotify is experimenting with a web playback API now[0], but as far as I can see it's still pretty limited.

[0]: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk...

[Finnucane]

And then people would complain that there were 1200 apps in the app store that did the same thing, and most of them badly.

[danShumway]

And those people can just be safely ignored. I get that people get annoyed at needing to sift through a lot of options, but the way to solve that is by having more curated lists, rankings, and recommendations.

I am almost entirely unsympathetic to people who argue that having too much choice is a bad thing on an app store. That's not a real problem.

[Finnucane]

>he way to solve that is by having more curated lists, rankings, and recommendations.

Yeah, sure, then we only need a few meta-rankings to know which of those we actually need to pay attention to.

[danShumway]

Yes? I'm guessing you're being sarcastic with your comment, but lists of lists genuinely scale quite well. You can be as meta as you want, and in fact the more meta you get, the easier it becomes to filter out choices for people who are paralyzed by having too many options.

Of course, when you build recommendation engines and lists, you run the risk of filtering out quality offerings. But if the alternative you're proposing is we only have 1 or 2 choices for each type of app, then accidentally filtering out quality offerings is probably not a real concern for you.

Filters, reviews, and lists are great. They're how I select products to buy online, how I get book/movie/game recommendations, how I decide what Linux software to install on my computer. Curated content recommendations are the entire premise behind sites like HN and Reddit. This stuff really does work.