[berkut]

In my opinion, the iOS experience for playing offline music is going downhill, and has been since the iPhone 3GS era.

It gets more and more difficult to have a UI dedicated to offline music - you can disable streaming, but you can't disable the 'Radio' section of the Music app for example.

Similarly, the user experience has got quite a bit worse for navigating your catalogue: 10 years or so ago, you used to be able to click the Name of the Artist or Album that was playing, and it would jump to either the artist or the album respectively: these days, on iOS 15, doing that does nothing other than jump back to the currently playing song list (so current album normally), neither does hold-and-press. I have to navigate with the back button, or go back through library, and find the artist each time, or use search.

There are third part dedicated apps and I've tried some of them (and bought Ecoute and VOX), but they're not perfect either.

[dangus]

If the Sony Walkman’s player isn’t perfect, you can’t replace it, because it’s not a general purpose computing device like a smartphone.