In something of a rare admission, Apple’s Oliver Schusser this week said that the company has a lot of work to do before Apple Music is ready for a prime time release on Android.
“Our focus is on editorial and playlists, and obviously we have teams all around the world working on that, but we’re also adding features and cleaning up certain things,” Schusser said in an interview with The Guardian earlier in the week.
For the time being, Apple Music’s frustrating shortcomings aren’t fall short of being infuriating because users are still within the service’s free three-month trial period. But once that trial period ends, which for most people will be some time in October, Apple better hope that it has gotten a lot of the kinks worked out. Otherwise, it will be hard to justify dropping a Spotify subscription for Apple Music.
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Highlighting many of the grievances many Apple Music users are still encountering with the service, a recent Reddit thread on the topic shows that Apple still has a lot of work to do.
As you’ll see in a few of the excerpts below, we’re not talking about a situation where users have minor annoyances here and there. On the contrary, many of the complaints involve the fundamental UI and functionality of the site, problems that we ourselves have documented in a few posts over the last few weeks.
One commenter voiced a complaint about creating playlists in Apple Music, a problem I myself am still encountering.
The week before Apple Music came out, I created a Spotify account to create a playlist for a trip. First time I used Spotify, I had no problem doing this. I would have liked to have had the search results in one window and my playlist in another, but there was nothing confusing about it. The playlist worked beautifully on multiple devices.
Since Apple Music has come out, I have been trying to create a playlist. I have tried iTunes. I have tried on my phone. Both were confusing. Songs it said it added to the playlist do not appear in it on any of my devices. The playlist has different songs on each device.
I am no big fan of Spotify. (And with six Macs, four iPads, four iPhones, two Apple Watches, and two Apple TVs, I cannot deny being an Apple fan.) But—for me—Apple Music has indeed been much more confusing than Spotify.
Meanwhile, another user suggests that Apple perhaps rolled out too many new features at once, all at the expense of core functionality.
They added way too many “new features” that are useless to a music library, and in the process hid all the things that made the music app a good music library/playback app. I just want to play my songs goddamnit!
Another user argues that Apple Music was launched far too soon, thereby wasting some inherent strategic advantages Apple could have exploited at launch.
At launch Apple Music had the huge advantages of a massive install base (iPhones, iPods, Macs, etc), the good reputation of Apple, a bigger library, a free trial a fourth of a freaking year long, and the very well priced family plan. That’s far more than necessary to dominate the market.
But instead of getting the product right and then releasing it, they threw core principles of Apple, like simplicity and quality, right out the window, and just plopped a half baked product in front of people. A terrible and stupidly overcomplicated UI, simple features completely missing, bugs and spotty service, poor performance, etc.
What the hell happened to “it just works”?
Everyone I know has gone back to Spotify or whatever they were using, even those that are hardcore Apple people. They’ve completely squandered every single one of the massive advantages they had, and put themselves in a terrible spot.
And while many users seem to enjoy the curated content, it’s outweighed by playlist frustrations.
Couldn’t figure out a quick and efficient way to add music I liked from curated lists/radio/”pandora” to playlists. Back to spotify and I’m not at all sad.
I do like the curated content, its better than Spotify’s, but that’s secondary to discovering music AND building playlists from that music.
The curated content is admittedly great, but with no consistent way to save songs to user created playlists, it’s almost all for naught. Indeed, playlist problems appear to be one of the top complaints users have.
After using Apple Music for a few weeks, it felt like some things were starting to make sense, but there are many things that just don’t work right.
For example, the playlists that I synced to my iPhone, from iTunes: Once I enable Apple Music, they disappear. I also can’t sync music/playlists/playcounts when Apple Music is enabled.
I’m sure that some of these issues wouldn’t be so bad if I were a user who only purchased music on iTunes, and perhaps didn’t care about syncing to/from iTunes, but as far as I’m concerned, Apple Music is still a bit “broken”.
And lastly, the creator of the Reddit thread posted this photo which highlights the UI inconsistencies of the entire service.
Hopefully Apple can get a handle on this before the service’s three month trial period expires.
