Ten Basic Things Spotify for Android Doesn’t Do (But Really Should)

21 Replies
I use Spotify on my Samsung Galaxy S II Android phone every day, and its limitations are really starting to grate. I’ve already posted at length about how Spotify’s Android app pales in comparison to its iPhone counterpart (see the Spotify Mobile Faceoff: iPhone vs. Android), but there are some problems that I’ve gotten so used to that I wanted to step back and list a few things that really ought to be in there.

 

  • I’m listening to a track in a playlist. I want to add the track to another playlist. No can do. – as Fred points out in the comments below, this is possible! So I will replace this with: I want to be able to move songs around in a playlist. You can on iPhone, but on Android your playlist is pretty much uneditable.
  • I want to search for a particular playlist. No joy: playlist titles are not searchable.
  • I want to see my playlist folders like on the desktop. Tough luck, only iPhone users are allowed that privilege.
  • I want to move a playlist to the top so that it’s easier to find. Not on Android I can’t, them playlists are all staying where they are!
  • I want to listen to my tunes at the same high bitrate as I do on the desktop (it’s what I’m paying for after all). But Spotify decided that since I’m listening on mobile, I obviously don’t care about audio quality so the maximum it’ll give me is a lowly 160kbps. And they call that “high quality” just to doubly wind me up.
  • I want it to work in landscape mode so that I can actually read playlist and track titles that are longer than 25 characters. Rumors suggest that it does work sideways on a few select devices, but I’ve had six Android phones and it hasn’t worked on any of them.
  • I want to be able to see the little messages people add when they inbox me a song.
  • I want the Top Tracks tag to have some relevance to me. I don’t care what the top songs are on the planet, I’m just not really a mainstream kinda guy.
  • I want to know how many more songs I can sync offline before I hit the randomly imposed limit of 3,333 songs.
  • Finally, when I view a list of albums I want to see the album coverart, not lots of white circles looking like they can from a Tron game circa 1982.

Not very exciting to look at, is it?

So those are my grumbles. Of course the app does still do the main thing it was designed for: play music. But when the alternatives are the vastly superior Android apps from competitors like Deezer, Rdio, and MOG it’s a worry that Spotify is lagging so far behind.