| > the requirements for their application are pretty straightforward. Surprisingly, not entirely straightforward. Source: working at Spotify. Should the app be better? OF COURSE. But the scenarios it can be used in can be weird and complicated by legal matters. If a user on free tier joins a group session over wi-fi at a friend's house, when the friend has premium subscription, what happens to queues, song skips, and what status is displayed on which devices? :) Note: even getting the device name is often tricky. And there are hundreds of such use cases per device because different devices have different capabilities and limitations (on some devices you don't even have control over the UI presented to the user). Without revealing too much, there's an ongoing work to make this stuff better, faster, more seamless, and from personal experience Spotify has been better across devices in recent years. But... It's still weird, brittle at times, and takes time to propagate to some devices and apps. But it should get better (don't quote me on that :)) ) |
But the flip-side of that is that every single time I try to use this software—something I fork over money for every month—it fails in some baffling, opaque way. At that level it’s more of a management and prioritisation issue - this is exactly the sort of thing that is likely to make me throw my hands up and switch to an alternative.