[rednum]

Looking at title I thought it was rant about product quality. But it's not, so I'll provide mine.

Since 2013 when I've started paying for Spotify it has turned from one of my favourite apps to one of those I hate most. On my previous Android phone it would freeze every other day when there was no internet. Why? Who knows. Could be related to me using SD card, or could be something else. The phone wasn't very old, but still on many days it was basically unusable. Somehow I was gifted a new phone and it kind of works. I say kind of, because sometimes when I click on a downloaded album it doesn't work - no tracks display. Why? Who knows. And few days ago something bugged out and tracks suddenly started setting volume to max. Apparently it's known issue that appears occasionally. Why? Who knows. Happily I wasn't wearing headphones so I did not get hearing damage. But who knows, maybe this will happen again.

There is also desktop app which severely crippled local file support few years ago. That really sucked for me, because I record a lot of my own stuff and I want to listen to music in one place. I don't know if this was fixed since then because I pretty much switched to using web app, which usually works. There is also iPad app which seems to routinely delete stuff I have downloaded do my iPad; and sometimes it also freeze in offline mode when browsing my library. At this point I didn't even try filing a ticket with support, I lost hope of them fixing this. I suppose soon I will simply stop paying them and make switch to something else.

EDIT: Why post this here? I hope people at Spotify see that submission about Spotify is on top of HN, and maybe, hopefully, someone sees my comments and thinks twice about setting 2021 OKRs and put some capacity into improving the app reliability. I know, this is optimistic, but who knows.

[helmholtz]

I've got the polar opposite opinion to yours. Spotify has been God's gift to mankind as far as my experience goes. I'll get the negative out of the way first: their UI teams loves to keep tweaking stuff, which is annoying. It's a stable app and they should leave it alone.

Having said that, it's wonderful. I can download all my music. It has some truly wonderful playlists for when I'm coding. It's recommendation engine seems to recommend really nice tunes week after week. The yearly reviews, the On Repeat etc. all this stuff is really nice to look back at.

Then, I FINALLY have a podcast search which can search for podcast episodes and then, when I click on the search result, take me to tho god-damned episode instead of the full podcast with 2500 fucking episodes to hunt through. It actually has a sane podcast interface that isn't a cluttered mess.

I was so sceptical of it because I loved Pandora to the absolute hilt, but now it's the only Saas I pay monthly for.

[slfnflctd]

I completely fell in love with Pandora at first. New music discovery is one of my favorite things. Eventually, though, it stopped giving it to me. Despite having over 100 stations, I started hearing mostly repeats. Also, of the artists I liked, they were only playing me a small fraction of their work. And I missed albums.

Spotify has been a breath of fresh air, I switched a couple years ago. It is missing some stuff here & there, but I haven't hit too many bugs like others have (on Windows or Android), and their catalog is much bigger than Pandora's was when I was using it heavily. Turns out, what I needed was more content. What once seemed like Pandora's best strength - that 'special sauce' recommendation algorithm - is now clearly being done to a similar or greater level of competence by damn near everyone else in the space. And like you say, the podcast stuff has been solid & gotten better, too. These things never turn out how I expect.

[rednum]

I had similar opinion to yours until around 2015, then things started to break randomly. To be fair, I discovered some good stuff via recommendation and I like other features you mentioned (though I don't really use podcasts). However none of this matters when basic playback functionality is broken.

[Shacklz]

Couldn't agree more. Spotify is one of those products that I sort of almost can't live without but yet it's painful how bad they have become in the last couple of years. Instead of improving the service and customer experience, it only got worse (if I had the chance to straight up use an outdated client from a couple of years ago, I would!).

The fun thing is, my company has jumped on the agile train a while back (nothing wrong with that per se in my opinion), and Spotify was always that cool example "where agile works". Well, no idea what they're doing, but if their KPIs mainly consist of how bad of a UX they get away with, they for sure are very successfully improving their product.

It constantly forgets which episodes of a podcast I've already listened to, or where exactly I've stopped when in the middle of an episode. Their support for downloaded songs at this point seems to be almost non-existent (I stopped using spotify offline quite some time ago as it became too much of an annoyance). If a song I liked is not available anymore but is then available again, I have to like it again. It still can't differentiate between studio and live versions of songs which I would like to filter out (I hope someone corrects me that I'm just too dumb to find the right button). I once got an email that one of the bands I liked released a new album - but it was a band with an identical name (and never heard of before!); apparently, they send out mails by matching band names instead of some unique IDs (no idea how that passed any kind of review; must've been some mashed-together 11-hour release).

... the list could go on and on. The thing is; I really want Spotify to be good, it's what made me stop pirating music, it was just way more convenient. It still is, but it could be so much more, especially given all the cash they're rolling in.

[imglorp]

And they removed most of your opportunities to steer recommendation. There should be a like/dislike band/song at every point in all UIs for paid users; there used to be but it was taken away from most places on most UIs. The community forum has thousands of votes on this matter and Spotify ignores it.

I suspect recommendation is more steered by contract agreements than showing you new bands you might like.

[allenu]

Spotify on the Mac has given me lots of little issues here and there in the last year. It's incredibly frustrating to have to restart it now and again.

I have encountered situations where I hit PLAY and nothing happens, or I hit PLAY and it says it's playing, but there's no audio, or I hit PLAY and the app says it's unable to play the track. Restarting the app seems to fix most of these issues.

There are also scroll bugs when browsing podcast episodes. The scroll position will just jump to the same spot as you try to scroll down the page, making it impossible to view the episodes in a series.

[alex_c]

Probably related to this 3-year-old unresolved issue with Bluetooth headphones:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Spotify-won-...

[allenu]

Yes! One of the issues is definitely due to switching on/off Bluetooth headphones during playback. It has actually changed my behavior. I intentionally pause playback now when I turn on headphones.

[city41]

This is the main issue I had as well. I'm on Linux, and tried all Linux flavors of Spotify that exist to no avail. I switched to Amazon and haven't looked back. You press play, music plays.

[svantana]

I have a similar experience, the mac client has been pretty broken for me in the last few months, it refuses to play about half of all tracks among other things. And opening of links to tracks has been semi-broken for years.

They have over 1k employees, surely many of them experience the same easily fixable flaws? My fav theory is, once a company becomes successful and big enough, noone wants to own problems, everyone wants to be part of new exciting projects with a purely positive outlook. And if business is going well, upper management has no reason nor (informal) mandate to get tough and make strong demands.

[tachyonbeam]

To add to the list of complaints... The Chromecast streaming feature is also broken. It will randomly pause in the middle of playback. This bug has existed for months and months. My configuration is very vanilla. Common phone, TV with built-in Chromecast, no other devices you could stream to on the network, stable internet connection...

[Slikey]

Spotify became entirely unusable for me when I started using Bluetooth headphones on my computer. When I turn them off, Spotify goes into some weird attempt to play every single song in rapid succession as it has no Output device to play to. Finally crashing so bad that I have to end the process and reopen it. It doesn't help that I've reported that a long time ago and even though the QA triage should have marked this as a low hanging fruit, nothing has happened. // rant end, I know this post doesn't help anything but venting is always a form of self-therapy haha

[city41]

I canceled Spotify and switched to Amazon Music Unlimited, primarily due to how buggy Spotify is. AMU does have one annoying bug I've found (that seems to have emerged after the recent redesign) but other than that it's been totally flawless. Reliable apps are such a joy to use. I feel this side of software is not appreciated enough anymore.

[WillYouFinish]

I agree about the Spotify desktop app. It got worse and worse. But for me there are different reasons. Especially the performance got worse enormously. Still running the 0.9.7. The old Android apps were way faster, too. I really miss those times. Hardware got better but software got so much worse it's pure insanity.