Shuffle in iOS 9.2’s Music App
With Music.app in OS 9.x Apple effectively made “shuffle” the default way to play an album or playlist. That’s not necessarily bad, but where they went off the rails was they gave one icon two very different behaviors.
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So on this screen, to recap, there are 3 functions, play non-shuffle, play-shuffle, and pause. The functions are distributed between two controls, one a toggle and the other an action button, and the action button uses the same icon as a toggle control that appears on another screen.
More generally, the new Music app is a regression for anyone not using Apple Music. There’s too much going on, too many indicators and controls that I don’t need to see. The font is too small, yet text is also too often truncated. All the music that I listen to is stored on the iPhone, and it wastes a line at the top of the screen to constantly tell me this. Then it shows barely recognizable iPhone-checkmark icons on each song, not lined up. The Albums and Artists tabs at the bottom are gone, replaced by Radio and Connect, which I never use.
Update (2018-03-27): Wil Shipley:
“Team, should we just make the experience worse and worse for customers who’ve bought thousands of dollars worth of music through iTunes to force them to Apple Music?”
“Well, let’s see, we already removed making genius playlists from users’ collections that they blew their cash on, and we made it so links to songs try to open in Apple Music even when they're not subscribed, hmm, what else…”
Update (2018-04-29): Donovan Bond:
I remember when Apple’s objective with music was to make it “just work”.
Now it seems their objective is to make people subscribe.
iTunes sucks. The Music app sucks for anyone who has their own library of music. Airplay is largely broken.
I miss Apple.
