Can I rip my own CDs and import them into Spotify or am I limited to the music provided by the Spotify streaming service?

I think this is what is meant by a “music library”

Apple Music (especially when coming from iTunes) has a very tight concept of a "Library". If you add an album to your library, all the songs are also in your library. If you add a playlist, you have the option to add all the songs to your library.

In my (arguably limited) experience with Spotify Premium, I can't browse all my songs in my "Library". If I'm missing something in the UI, please let me know; I would love to hear otherwise.

I guess after clicking on "Your Library" he isn't switching to the "Artists" or "Albums" tabs. Then again, I don't know what it looks like when you're not a subscriber. The Spotify app doesn't "see" your music in your iTunes library, perhaps that is the complaint?

Yeah, I came here to say this. If you want to access all the songs you've ever liked or added to a playlist or saved then you literally press the "Your Library" button at the bottom of the screen and you can sort by playlist, artist, or album. The author is totally ignorant of this fact.

I have an Apple Music subscription and use Apple Music (the app) daily.

In this article, I hear a lot of "I". IMO, the big challenge with Apple Music is all the legacy that a) personal libraries, b) iTunes Match, and c) iTunes purchases all bring to the new streaming paradigm. Those are problems Apple has to solve, and can't just discard. Apple's customers have plowed tons of $$$ to "own" their libraries, and Apple is doing the right thing to bring them along.

That complexity explains the difference between "hearting" a song/playlist/station and "plus'ing" one, or "clouding" one, amongst others.

I actually appreciate Apple's queue approach, which has a long history in iTunes. I love being able to insert or reorder songs without having to "recover" the previous state. That may not be everyone's cup of tea, or mental model, but it isn't bad design.

I do agree with the author that configurability of the tabs and the main buttons of the Now Playing screen would be handy. I know of several changes I'd make if able.

I do think that there are several good criticisms here, but when the first paragraph includes a lot of "I don't care about"s, that is a good sign to me that the author is not thinking about the design challenges holistically.

As someone who worked on Google Play Music for many years, I'd like to point out that a lot of the UX criticisms here are really just personal preferences, and those preferences are based in very large part on the way you listen to music. Some people are "lean back" listeners who just want to put on a radio station of music they like and not fiddle with it. Others are expert curators who have tens of thousands of tracks in their personal collections. Some are all about their personal custom playlists, and don't care about music libraries or radio stations at all.

It is pretty much impossible to build a music UX that optimizes for all three of these user types, since they want such different things. Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play Music have all made different choices in how they address this. Some of those were (IMHO) good choices, others weren't. But it is dangerous to assume that what works well for you will work well for others. The discussion about the queue here is a great example: one person hates it with a passion, another loves it.

Apple Music, and particularly iTunes Match, are the opposite of "just works". I wanted to switch back from Spotify, but I found that Match had made a complete mess of my library. Half of my album art gone. Albums were striped with some tracks that were replaced with the iTunes store versions, and some left as my uploaded MP3 V0 versions (most obvious because, even with Sound Check on, the volume levels between each track differ greatly post-iTunes Match).

I've been able to look past a lot of the decline in Apple's software quality, but the data corruption problems springing up (Catalina Mail, iOS 13 Photos incidents also come to mind) are a bridge too far. The primary reason I avoid turning on a new Apple cloud service is that it's likely it'll do something highly undesirable to my data.

I have both Apple Music and Spotify, and i also dislike Apple's Music app;

First, it deleted ALL my playlists on a random day for no apparent reason, and i couldn't restore them from backups because apparently the playlists are stored in the cloud or whatever and not in a local file.

Also, after converting my personal library to "iCloud", Apple replaced all my specific versions of songs with crappy alternative versions, without notifying me beforehand. Very frustrating.

Spotify's user interface is so much better, i can't understand how anyone would prefer Apple Music. Also i much prefer Spotify's radio/recommendations.

Don't forget the mundane detail of "I have no idea what Apple did with my 60GB music library or how to get it on my phone again".

Thankfully I've been a spotify subscriber for years so I can just keep kicking that can down the road, but some day I'd like my music back.

While I can cope with the UI, what really drives me nuts are actual bugs. Sometimes, albums are split into two parts. Sometimes, songs are randomly missing. When downloading music, sometimes it takes forever or just doesn’t download at all. My most favorite one: when I plug the phone into my car, in 1/2 cases it stops playback (even from another app) and starts playing a random song. It’s always the same. And it’s a good song. But it is something different. Imagine you get into your car at 6am listening to a podcast and suddenly Metallica starts screaming at you.

I feel like Music.app is a pair of similar apps squished together, when they share no common frontend functionality and work far better apart:

• Apple Music (the subscription service)

• iTunes (the library with syncing and an optional digital music locker subscription-service)

Each of the two has its own obvious top-level navigation. Each of the two has its own independent backend services (e.g. the recommendations in Apple Music; the iTunes Store and the cloud music locker in the iTunes app.) They would also share some backend services (e.g. the object storage of songs that are streamed in Apple Music vs. “matched“ in iTunes) but other iOS apps share these services too (e.g. Apple Podcasts, Apple TV.)

Why are they the same app?

While I agree iOS 13’s Music.app is pretty shoddy in many respects, there’s plenty of alternatives other than Spotify that might better fit their requirements. (Marvis Pro, Soor, etc.)

I consolidate the biggest players yearly in a review, which might be helpful for the author’s search: https://barrowclift.me/post/second-annual-ios-music-player-c...

He's completely right about Apple Music and it's been bad since long before iOS 13. The navigation is incredibly difficult to understand. I get very frustrated about why I have to both tell Apple I love something and put it in my library before their algorithms are smart enough to figure out that maybe I like that band / song and they should find related music. The Spotify discovery algorithms are better in every way.

So why even bother with Apple Music - it's really simple and it's why I see Apple services being huge... you get an Apple card and its cash back will pay your Apple Music and Apple TV+ and Apple News+ bill every month. Why pay for another music service when Apple Music is "good enough" and is "free" at that point?

> Except that I already pay for Apple Music, I don’t use these tabs, and I’m considering leaving Apple Music for Spotify

Stop ranting and do it. Vote with your wallet. Your $10 tells Apple that everything is fine.

I don’t subscribe to any music, personally. I use the Music app with Apple Music disabled (Settings > Music > Show Apple Music (Off)).

I was considering making a blog post comparing the design of the "golden age" of iOS versus now. I see someone already beat me to that and am grateful for it.

Look at the screenshots in the previous versions compared to now. Design is down to personal preference (personally I think the earlier versions had more "rich" design and a personality, bits of which were lost with each upgrade) but you can't argue that we are losing functionality, despite screen sizes going up and having more than enough space to accommodate all the features.

My main beef with Music as it currently stands is that the Now Playing tab is just a tiny phone-sized thing that refuses to fill the screen of my tablet. I wanna plug that thing into the stereo, play music, and SEE THE ALBUM ART like it’s 1986 and I’ve got the LP jacket sitting in front of the turntable.

Also the occasional attempts to upsell me to their streaming service that bring up a blank window that sits there waiting for something to load off the net and can only be dismissed by force quitting Music and hoping it doesn’t decide to do that again when I relaunch it can die in a fire.

I don’t curate playlists much and when I do it’s on the computer.

Is it possible that some un-learning needs to be done here? I know some people who cannot get over Winamp, hate everything that is not like Winamp.

I don't share the same frustrations with the author, so the correct title maybe should be "iOS 13's Music App Sucks (according to me)".

My music listening process is like "I hear a song, ask Siri about the name of the song, tap on the song listen to the song and start a radio with that song and if another song comes to my mind search for it add it as play next. If I like s song I add it to my library".

I almost always listen to music like that, only the beginning would be different(Instead of asking Siri, a song would come to my mind and start from there).

I briefly got frustrated when Apple hide the Love button but quickly forgot about it.

Anyway, I don't believe in playlists, I believe in moods. Apple Music works great for me while Spotify was the worst among many. With Spotify, I am supposed to do labour in order to listen to music. That's not me, I don't chase playlists. Youtube is also great, they also manage to suggest very relevant music videos when I start from something.

So did 12, 11, ... 7, when they stopped allowing to sort songs and albums, which worked in 6. Things got much worse once they added Apple Music, it's been a ridiculously painful minesweeper game not to sign up. I buy most of my music on bandcamp, and upload the mp3s through iTunes. As long as that works, I will never subscribe, so stop forcing me...

This article really struck a nerve with me. I've been going around trying to explain to people that the experience of listening to music has got progressively worse over the last 20 years.

* Discovery is back to being passive - recommendations come from the company that you are subscribed to.

* Quality is paid for separately - the subscription has a fee, your data has a separate fee.

* Quality is not guaranteed - it depends on your current internet connection.

* There are dead zones.

* Most apps I've used do a terrible job showing you only the downloaded music you have.

* Your available music is subject to the deals between record labels and subscription services.

* Subscription services aren't incentivized to house more obscure / old / rare / hard to find music.

* Music is siloed in to different subscription services. ( We are moving to a Showtime vs Starz vs HBO vs Netflix model )

What really gets me is that at the end of the day - going the legal route of a subscription service is truly only marginally better for artists.

> First things first, why do I get a tab bar with 5 icons, and I only ever use 2 of them? I don’t care about “For You”, “Browse” and I certainly don’t give a rat’s ass about ”Radio”.

You lost me on the opening sentence. I didn't even bother to read the rest of the article. I was expecting this to be based some some valid objective reasons why the app sucks, not personal preferences.

I use Spotify, and have found the "Radio" feature really handy to find new music that is similar to music I already like - especially when creating a new radio station from a custom playlist I made or artist I like.

I've seen a couple of rants about Apple software here on HN the last few days. It's important to remember that Apple has never been very good at software services.

Sometimes they make something good, but usually they make "just ok".

Because they never had to be good. Their hardware was compelling enough that people just suffered through their software because they had to.

But now they're trying to make money from their software services. They're probably fooled into thinking they are doing a good job because their revenue is so high and their customer base is so large, especially compared to their competitors.

But I think that's a red herring for them. They are still benefiting from their installed hardware base. I doubt they would have even half the customer base they do if they were just selling software (like say on Windows).

If they really want to make software services a key pillar of their business, they need to step up their game. They need to interview customers and listen to their needs. They need to collect analytics on usage and then actually analyze them to improve their products.

I think if they would spend a bit more resources on their software, and give their engineers a bit more leeway to experiment and actually talk to customers, they would be far more successful than they already are.

I think their culture of secrecy is hurting them in the software space, and always has.

This article prompted me to clean up my playlists, which have been 'append only' for quite a few years, and wow. What a disaster.

First: swipe-from-right doesn't reveal a red delete button, like you'd expect. So I hit the search engine, discover you have to long-press to delete. Annoying, but okay, progress.

Now, there are some albums on my Playlist page. Which is weird, and I don't remember putting them there. But when I long-press those albums, it gives me "Add to a Playlist..", which is... weird, can you add a playlist to a playlist? Anyway, there's a "Remove.." as well, let's try that.

The option screen lets me Remove Downloads or Delete from Library. I try Remove Downloads, since this is an album I put in iTunes myself and I don't want to lose it.

This... removes the album from my phone. And keeps the Playlist. There seems to be no way to remove the playlist, and keep the album.

That is, of course, what I want to do. It's an album! It doesn't need to be a playlist!! When I want it, I go to Artists or Albums!!!

This is madness. Does anyone at Apple actually use their own software?

Anyone remember Rdio? It was such a beautifully designed app. It's wild that Spotify and Apple failed to learn anything from them. Granted, Rdio did go bankrupt, but I think that had more to do with record label negotiations, and less with their app design. But who knows.

We have used Apple Music for over a year, and it works great for our use case “I want to listen to song by such and such” — with kids you do a lot of repeat plays.

Integration with Echo devices was a nice plus, but we had been gifted a Google Home which does not play Apple Music.

People rave about Spotify, so we took the plunge. It did link with my Google Home and Echo devices.

Everything else was disappointing. The interface was fine, but seemed to not work as well, there were no lyrics and we found many artists just missing.

But the worst was Alexa integration, we would ask for some mainstream song and get some random Muzak cover, no matter how carefully we specified the artist and song.

And CarPlay integration did not allow access to library or song selection.

The elephant in the room here is that Apple forces you to use the Music app to manage/navigate/enjoy the music you have locally on your phone (I'm 90% sure I'm right about this).

They maintain a monopoly on that functionality, and therefore when they make decisions that don't align with your desires or expectations, you have no recourse. You can't just use a different app - on your own device - that suits you better.

If they opened this up to third-party apps, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Apple, Spotify, etc. (or a third-party) need to agree on a standard format for a users music library so that we can switch between UIs more easily - separate the UI from the actual music provider, allow more niche UIs

Obviously nobody will do this because their whole game is locking people in - but nothing is stopping Apple/Spotify from exposing a dev interface to Apple Music's UI components that would allow essentially the same thing but only with Apple Music as backend provider

Rdio was amazing. I use Apple Music now (family plan) but I would pay probably $25/month to have Rdio back. Rdio had the best features for following other people who had similar interests to me and seeing what they were currently listening to. It was amazing. And it was an experience using Rdio. I would be in the app during my work day quite a lot seeing what music there was to discover. Music discovery was never better. I want Rdio back!

That app has gotten worse and worse every year. I get that they need to cater to Apple Music subscribers: fine. Why can't there be a setting to turn off all the Apple Music stuff for nonsubscribers? And for people like myself that really really hate the app, why lock down the APIs to make third party music apps shit as well? It's just so frustrating, the music app really has been terrible since somewhere around iOS 8.

I have both Spotify and Apple Music but somehow the Spotify interface to me seems just simple enough that I can play what I want and the interface gets out of the way. With Apple it’s almost like they want you to listen to what they want you to listen and not what you want to listen to. This is what basically companies trying to push their content do over what content you prefer and it almost always ends up in bad interfaces.

> It is pretty much impossible to build a music UX that optimizes for all three of these user types

This is a good argument for not tying music subscriptions to a specific client -- ie, allowing 3rd-party clients that are optimized for my specific user-type to freely hook into and stream from my Google Play Music subscription via an official API. The Google Play Music client is not optimized for users like me. I'm sure it was a lot of work to build, but I am not the target demographic of any of the interface decisions that have been made, and I curse the designers every time I open the app.

So it's weird that, say, Shuttle, a music client that is optimized for me as a user, can't hook into my account or even download my purchased music.

I don't mean to call out Google Music in specific, because while it doesn't have good public APIs, they're at least consistent enough that alternative clients are being made on desktop.[0]

But I do see this as a trend across a lot of SaaS services -- Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, Apple Music. People complain that the services aren't optimized for them, and designers will roll their eyes and say, "you can't optimize for everyone".

And that's true. But who's fault is it that you have to optimize for everyone? Who's fault is it that you have to try and figure out how to balance a bunch of wildly diverse and often contradictory needs? There used to be really good alternative Twitter clients, and if Twitter wants to complain now that building one client for everyone is hard, I just can't muster the energy to feel sorry for them.

Apple's whole shtick is trying to get everyone to use the same official apps, to have the same consistent, good experience. I'm not sympathetic to a company that deliberately puts themselves into that position and then complains, "optimizing for everyone at the same time is hard."

[0]: https://github.com/MarshallOfSound/Google-Play-Music-Desktop...

Exactly.

I live in a house of 6 people. We have discussed this at the dinner table, and it's just too bad the iOS music app isn't completely re-configurable so each user can make it their own.

When you start the app, it can ask "Are you a lean-back music listener?" "Are you an expert curator of playlists?" etc. And then it gives you a default view that's a little more suitable to YOU.

But they don't do this.

I use Pandora. I turn on the station related to the Artist I want, and this is all I ever do. I only listen in my car, so I sit down, plug in, open Pandora, press play. I don't even bother to change the artist/station usually unless I'm maybe sitting in my car waiting for something.

2 of my sons have vast playlists in iTunes. They create fine-tuned play lists and are constantly adding and removing songs from lists and creating different listening experiences.

My wife is a great middle-ground. She knows lots of music. She knows artists, new songs, old songs, lyrics. She chooses music based on her mood every day. She uses Alexa in her car to pull up play lists she has compiled on Amazon music. Her phone has backup playlists for plugging in when she's in my car and not willing to listen to whatever randomness I have queued up on Pandora.

Let's just say entertainment consumption in general is a broad topic. Creating the perfect player is impossible and therefore should be 100% configurable.

Can we all agree that the "now playing" screen is objectively worse. I had to google how to set repeat and shuffle. (You have to "scroll up" from the bottom. Not swipe, but a scroll like motion.

I studied Human Computer Interaction and interfaces in college . It's hidden and unintuitive for no good reason.

What surprises me most about your post is that someone actually worked on Google Play Music for multiple years. Doing what?

From what I could see, it shipped, then immediately turned into abandoned-ware which it still is today (in spite of being "replaced" by YouTube Music which is also abandoned-ware almost from its release).

I actually still pay for GPM (for Ad-Free YouTube) but also pay for Amazon's Unlimited because Amazon's Music offering actually consistently works well and makes music discovery pleasant. Or to phase another way, I actually pay money to avoid using GPM or YT Music which I could use for "free." They're that terrible.

Something in common between both the modern "music" app from apple and google music app (android) is both try to push streaming services and there's no way to disable or block that.

Making them both VERY unsuitable to a device where a child has access.

Besides upselling incentivizing clutter, what's annoying is Apple feels the need to completely redesign the iTunes UI every year.

Good points. It may be worth allowing power users to choose which one of those archetypes they are via some advanced option somewhere, and that option controls which flavour of UI you get.

> Spotify's user interface is so much better, i can't understand how anyone would prefer Apple Music.

I've been very unimpressed with Spotify's iOS and iPadOS interface lately. I was OK with it for years when all I would do is either (1) tell it to play one of my playlists, or (2) find an album via search and tell it to play that.

Lately, though, I've been using Spotify to listen to music during timed activities. I know I'm going to spend N minutes on the activity, and want to queue up N minutes of music. So before starting the activity I go through my playlists picking songs and queuing them, or thinking of other songs that I'm the mood for, searching for them, and queuing them, trying to queue a little over N minutes.

Should be easy, right? From the song listing in a playlist or search, queue the song and keep a running total in my head of the times. Occasionally pop over to the queue view to check the total time.

Nope. That doesn't work because the stupid thing does not show the song times in playlist listing, search listings, or any other kind of listing I've found. The only way I know to find the length of a song is to start playing it and then look at the playback display which shows time elapses and time remaining.

Well, that's not quite true. You could also put the song by itself in a playlist, because it will show you the total length of a playlist.

The partial workaround is to make a new playlist, add the songs to that instead of the queue so that I can at least see the total time, and then queue the whole playlist when I've got my N minutes in it.

People have been asking for them to fix this for at least 5 years [1].

[1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Queue-length-i...

Spotify has better discovery and recommendations, that's for sure.

The killer feature for me is that Apple Music makes it seamless to add local mp3s into my library (accessible from anywhere). Spotify has this functionality, but you have to sync your phone on the same network as your computer and leave the app(s) open and go through a whole song-and-dance.

On AM, I just click "Add to iCloud" in iTunes and suddenly that track is available to stream from any device I own. The seamless integration is really a killer feature.

Spotify kinda sucks too imo. I tap on "Your Library" then "Artists," I see Lil Uzi Vert, "Choose artists," and a list of 'recommended artists based on the songs you like' of whom I have local files listed in no particular order at all. Moving over to albums, I have Kanye West's "Graduation" and "ye" listed twice, both saved, both the exact same explicit versions. Search is polluted by user playlists full of junk with the exact same name of whatever search terms you've tried. "listen on other devices" just doesn't hook to my blutooth speaker for me, even though it's listed and turned on. The UI is lazy in areas. Pull up the full playback window and you will see three dots in the top right, hiding 4 functions, three of which are already in front of you in the full playback window. It could just replaced with an 'add to playlist' button since that's the only utility in this menu, but then we wouldn't have to tap twice...

I've had spotify for 5 years now and it's always felt just as unpolished as when I first got a subscription, which is unfortunate.

I had one of those really nice 100GB music libraries that I had been ripping from CDs since 1998. (and Napster/WinMX/Kazaa/Limewire-ing because... I was young, stupid and poor) I had meticulously been fixing ID3 tags, and putting them into the folder structure that made me happy. Then one day, I did a new Mac setup, and forgot to tick the box that said, "let me manage my library layout" and BAM. iTunes moved everything around. 10 years of collating, and sorting, etc, GONE. It's my fault for not backing it up... but wow. I basically just stopped listening to that library. I now do Spotify.

Spotify kept removing what I listen to so it got canned pretty quick.

Dunno if it'll work perfectly, but if you have the music on your PC you may be able to use the VLC app for iOS [1]. I use it for streaming movies / tv / music on my NAS but I think it can do some sort of PC sync.

[1]: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html

My wife has been fighting with iTunes screwing up her music library for years. It's a constant pain point for her.

My problem with Spotify: some bands aren't there.

> Sometimes, albums are split into two parts. Sometimes, songs are randomly missing.

Add “sometimes songs are replaced by versions from compilation albums” which is also incredibly frustrating if you like to curate a library. However, all of these bugs have been present since iTunes Match launched, long before Apple Music was a thing. I have no faith they’ll ever get fixed.

My theory is that rights for songs temporarily lapse or transfer, causing the album to be removed and re-added on the back end, and the system to match things back up is wonky.

Syncing music to the Apple Watch is also incredibly unreliable. I had to deduce that songs that aren’t downloaded to the phone will never transfer to the Watch (even though the Watch has its own WiFi connection) because the transfer screen just says “syncing...” forever.

Apple Music is horrible, but the lack of a real library in Spotify (as mentioned in the article) is just about keeping me subscribed.

Honestly you can say this about just about all Apple software now. Their quality has absolutely tanked.

I also enjoy the "play random song when plug into car" feature :)

That album splitting bug has been around for years and I don't know if they'll ever fix it. It's particularly infuriating because when you look at one half the album in your library there's a button to see the whole album in Apple Music's library, and when you click on it it shows that the entire album is downloaded anyways. So the system has the information it needs to group them as one but refuses to do so.

I am not sure but I think it's related to another longstanding issue where a particular version of a song is replaced with a different version of a song (usually one from a compilation or best-of album instead of the original single or EP, etc.)

This happens because:

1. The original app that was playing (Podcasts, Spotify, etc.) got automatically killed for whatever reason (consuming too much memory, etc.)

2. The default app for audio playback is Apple Music, so if you press play (or if your car resumes audio), that is the app that starts up.

There is no way (at least right now), to change the default app for audio playback on the phone.

Good page, I agree that Marvis is really excellent and is probably the single best reason to subscribe to Apple Music. It has a level of customisability kind of reminiscent of foobar2000, which is unusual for iOS apps, and at the same time it's the most visually smooth and polished of the lot (I also tried them all :)

While you're here, every time I try to load that page my browser (Firefox on Android) hangs with most of the page rendered, and then Android crashes. It's not my adblocker (uBO in default deny mode, still happens with it disabled), but I haven't yet nailed down what it is. Maybe some default flag I've switched, e.g. to disable notifications or block autoplay video?

This looks incredible! I've bookmarked this to check out later, but as an immediate question: do any of these support Apple Music/Spotify as a backend for downloading music? I'd prefer to stick with a monthly subscription for access to all music if at all possible.

Edit: also, you have an incredibly pretty website.

Your page is amazing! I love that you made small videos for all players, it really helps to see how the app works

Actually the radio is the biggest gripe I have with Spotify. They globally aggregate everything you've ever liked, so if you have tastes in multiple genres it's basically impossible to get your indie rock stations to stop playing EG trance or house music without also telling Spotify that no you actually don't like the dance music you also play sometimes.

The curated playlists are much better mainly because their radio algorithms are absolutely terrible.

You expected a page entitled "iOS 13's Music App Sucks" to be objective, of all things?

A subsequent sentence mentioned no longer being able to customize the tab bar, which was his real complaint.

It would be prudent to not be judgemental off of one sentence, particularly because the author was discussing something else.

Apple music has a station (radio) feature, which you can start from a song or album. It functions similarly to spotify's radio feature and is not what the author was talking about.

Apple's "radio" tab, not feature, shows you an advertisement for Beats 1 taking up half of the screen, then "recently played" taking up 30% of the screen, then things like "upcoming shows" and "broadcast radio". After a lot of scrolling, there is an alphabetical list of genres. I find almost all of this fairly irrelevant (I already have a podcasts app, as does apple), and the one thing I would expect to see ("Recommended for you") is absent. Is it so hard to give me some recommended stations before all of that other stuff?

Compare this to spotify's homepage which shows me music categories I actually listen to, and six daily playlists made for me which all reference different categories I listen to and make playlists of.

Compare these screenshots of apple music's radio tab [0] and spotify's homepage [1]. Spotify at least attempts to show me relevant content, unlike apple. So in ~6 months of usage I haven't used either of those tabs.

The author also makes actual points in the next sentence and the rest of the article.

edit: apple music does have "For you" tab, I had a brainfart when writing this. I originally compared it to the middle tab, which is "Browse" I think? (둘러보기 in Korean).

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/Pa6PKdM.jpg

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/DRCSOw5.jpg

> Their hardware was compelling enough that people just suffered through their software because they had to.

I couldn’t disagree more. Apple, from my understanding, is famously successful because they make both great hardware and great software. It’s the combination of both that made their hardware products sell like hot cakes. It’s the reason that year after year people keep complaining about the “Apple tax” on comparably-specced hardware. Customers don’t care because they want Apple software on their machines. Their operating systems are well optimized and user friendly. Their core apps range from decent to really great (presumably because the teams working on them are highly independent). Many of their core apps don’t even need third party replacements because they do everything you’ll ever need them to do. I just don’t see the argument for their software being consistently bad. Are there also bad examples? Yup. But I would pick Apple over Microsoft for consumer software any day of the week despite the former being “a hardware company” and the latter being “a software company”.

That doesn't sound correct to me. But when I go to privacy settings on my iPhone I see plenty of apps having been authorized by me to access my local music library. For example Google Maps has this permission, so that I can begin playback or change playlists right within a Maps navigation.

So at least Apple provides some kind of API to allow third parties to access your music library. I'm not just sure how extensive that API is.

Any app can save documents to local storage. As an example, I've 90GB of Spotify music on my phone, as I told it to download the entire "Liked songs" playlist. Google Play Music and YouTube Music also download to the phone. So no, you aren't forced to use Apple Music. You can even change Siri to use Spotify as a default in limited circumstances. It's not an iOS restriction the way independent browser implementations are restricted or how you can't set a default Mail app or Web Browser. There isn't even an iTunes app for syncing any more, so it's hard to argue that Apple has a giant advantage over third-parties ... except in how Apple gets a 30% cut of in-app subscriptions from third-parties, of course. And how asking Siri "What song is this?" always takes you to iTunes to buy it.

I'm 100% sure you're wrong about this.

For example, Marvis Pro exists. Heck, multiple web interfaces to Apple Music exist!

No, this is not correct. I sell an App that lets you play music that is stored locally on your phone. Before you rush to get it though: it is restricted to Operas. It also lets you play cloud music in your library if you subscribe to iTunes Match.

I can't update my post anymore but I'll say that I am wrong in the above post. I appreciate everyone's constructive comments that educated me.