Honestly, the two Spotify apps I regularly use (macOS and iOS) are some of the best apps I use. I’ve had small problems on the Windows app. But overall I find the Spotify experience fantastic. I have several thousand songs downloaded, and that works fine as long as I can keep the iOS from putting the app to sleep during a download.

In terms of alternatives, the Apple Music iOS app is pretty bad in terms of performance and bugs compared to Spotify. I can’t imagine the android app is much better.

I’ve heard that the other competitors are basically YouTube music or Amazon Music. Besides that, I guess there are the hi-fi options like Tidal. If I was going to try a different service, I’d probably go with YouTube Music so that I can also get YouTube premium.

Spotify a year or so ago added a button to "hide a song" if you don't like it. I think this is a good feature, but they put it right where the add to playlist button was at the top of options for a song.

This

Is

So

Stupid

Why would you put a less used button so far up the options list? Why would you put it right where my most used button is? This was the worst UI decision I've ever seen and I hope there is a dev on this thread that can go tell the UI people to fix this.

For me, playback of new songs often just doesn't happen on iOS. The app doesn't start playing the song at all. I need to like the song which I think makes the song available offline. This usually helps.

Been using the Apps for a few years and can't say I share the same problems.

Can we talk about their insanely bad UI for a moment? The UI to play through things NOT as shuffle is unreal. Just look how hidden it even is on their website [0]. Consider how hard it is to play an audiobook, or an album in order.

Further, I have never once wanted to shuffle-play (I just don't like it). But I constantly have to uncheck shuffle on my playlists.

I would conjecture that it is intentional at Spotify to balance out per-play payments. But I doubt Spotify will confirm/deny this.

[0]. https://support.spotify.com/us/article/play/ <- search for "To play in the order listed" . good luck.

What about UX though? Why on earth I cannot view all songs from one artist on mobile or web app (only desktop). I can only view all albums, so I should google which album the given song belongs to? I can search of course, but what if I don't remember the name exactly and will remember when I see it? What kind of PM or designer would think it's a great idea is beyond me. This is just one example, the app as a whole is almost as unintuitive as it can get compared to e.g. google music that was killed. It took me a while to discover how to view other songs for an artist, for example, and I doubt I'm alone here.

Android app: It works fine on my S10. It can glitch out sometimes, but that is rare. I admit I almost never use the offline functions. So maybe that part of the app is not well-made.

Web app: I don't use the web app.

Mac/Windows app: I use these and they work flawlessly for me. Maybe you can try this instead of the web player. Web apps are often trash, so I won't be surprised if Spotify's was too.

I once listened, partially, to a single “Learn Japanese” podcast. Now months later my Spotify homepage still recommends Japanese language learning podcasts every single day.

I’m currently checking out YouTube Music. The deal is quite good, since it comes with YouTube Premium. In my experience the algorithm feels better, and you tend not to wind up on less “meh” recommendations.

Spotify made much of their work model - completely autonomous teams working on whatever they thought was most important. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the reasons their app sucks is because of that. User interfaces don't really work when designed by committees.

If you are blocking any of their ip addresses (e.g. to reduce ads) then the songs might not load. Worth checking I suppose.

I’m mainly using their desktop app and the only issue I have seen is that the volume slider jumps a bit when I am connected to Spotify on multiple devices.

I think the biggest problem about Spotify is that they don't pay artists fairly. The money mostly go to big artists and independents get scraps. When they "fix" this problem, I might start using their apps, otherwise I feel it is unethical.

I installed spotify using flatpak on my manjaro and it has been running without any issues. The android/ipadOS app works without issue for me too.

In their defense, so does the Apple Music app.

Of course they do. Spotify sells a service, the apps are not the primary product. But there is no ecosystem of alternative apps because Spotify has locked down the API. Why should they care about them?