
Building Soundcloud's iOS App; in-depth retrospective - felixbraun
http://www.michaelevensen.com/
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ruddct
Ah, Soundcloud. One of the companies I should love the most given my usage of
it, but hate with a strong passion due to their product and technical bungles.
Let's take it from the top:

Product (applicable to iOS and web):

* Their mobile app and desktop products are, essentially, two completely different experiences. They have not evolved in sync with each other at all.

* Listening to tracks I've saved is hidden deep, deep within the app.

* Social capabilities don't exist in the app. Inexplicably, it's most of what exists on the desktop product.

* Oh look, I got a notification on the app. Who knows what it's about, though, no way to find out.

* What about something as simple as listening to a track and trying to figure out what time is? Nope. Their music player inexplicably hides the on-screen clock because some designer didn't want it messing with album artwork.

* Every aspect of the web product screams 'we just cloned every other social network out there all at once'. It's a messy hodgepodge of features, 80% of which I don't use.

Technical:

* This one is easier to explain. The web and mobile products are constantly, incredibly buggy. Music stops every 10 minutes or so, randomly. The app crashes. Display errors abound. It's a mess.

A shame because the 'magic moment' in Soundcloud is, truly, incredible. Make
connections with artists and tastemakers you like. See their music and
interact with moments of it with other fans. I'm frustrated because I truly
believe it could be great. Unfortunately, their product and technical teams
have not kept up.

~~~
adrianpike
Another fun one for me is when the web experience mysteriously pegs a CPU
core. Seems to happen every couple days.

~~~
Matsta
Happens to me as well, but only with Chrome. I Also have an issue when you go
to another tab and come back and all the waveforms have disappeared.

Firefox and Safari don't seem to have these issues.

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Matsta
Unfortunately, most of the radio shows I listen to are hosted on Soundcloud,
and I find the app is incredibly frustrating.

* If you stop a song and come back in a few minutes, it has forgotten and goes back to the start of the song. If you leave it for a few hours, it just restarts the app and goes to the homepage, and you have no way of figuring out what you were listening to.

* On accounts that update regularly, you have to refresh recent tracks manually every time, as it aggressively caches results which are usually weeks old.

* The player interface is too minimal. It puts so much emphasis on the track cover which is silly because it's a music app.

* The touch gestures are annoying and it's too easy to go accidently to the next track when you are seeking through a track

Seeing screenshots of the old app, it looks more like an upgrade of the
current app.

~~~
cr1895
>* If you stop a song and come back in a few minutes, it has forgotten and
goes back to the start of the song. If you leave it for a few hours, it just
restarts the app and goes to the homepage, and you have no way of figuring out
what you were listening to

Yes, this drives me mad! I didn't know if this was something only I
encountered, but apparently not. In my situation it loses track of what I was
listening to in a matter of minutes. Pause music to talk to someone for a bit?
I hope I remembered where in the track I was because I'm going to have to
search for it again and start over!

That's the other thing...there's no history or queue of music (or, I haven't
found it). I end up favoriting things because then it's easier to find again
once the app inevitably screws up my listening progress.

I tried searching for a solution (or to see if it was someone's idea of a
"feature") but it's a hard thing to describe.

~~~
audessuscest
Yes !

Mixcloud is far better for this, history, remember where you were in a song,
even if you listen other song after.

You listen a mix, want to change and you listen others, when play again the
first mix, it plays where you stopped, so great.

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colemercer
I'm a PM at SoundCloud and want to let everyone know that this post is very,
very old. I believe over 2 years. Difficult to tell from the site though.

That said, the feedback here in this thread is good feedback, so I do
appreciate everyone taking the time to write it. Much of will be resolved
soon, so keep on the lookout for future updates.

Let me know if you have any specific questions or input.

~~~
shostack
Glad to see you guys are listening and open.

Guess I'll toss in my own gripe. I played an album for my newborn daughter to
put her to sleep. Some nice soothing acoustic guitar. Yet when it reaches the
end it just auto plays some other loud rock track instead of stopping or
giving the option to loop. Made my own playlist of the same tracks from the
album hoping that would stop the offending track from playing at the end, but
no such luck.

Am I missing something stupid? I can't even figure out how it is selecting
this other random track to play at the end of my playlist.

~~~
colemercer
Thanks, we try to talk to users as much as possible.

What you're referring to is the autoplay of related tracks. Great feature for
background listening - not so much for your use case :)

You can turn it off by going to the options screen. Go to the "person" icon
tab, then the 3 dots button on the top right. De-select "Autoplay related
tracks".

Any other feedback and I'd love to hear it. You can always DM me on Twitter
@colemercer as well, I keep it open.

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spiralstaircase
As someone who got into Soundcloud after the new app was released, I've gotta
say the old app looks great... I wish I could use that! The new one is so
limited.

~~~
rfrank
The old app was significantly better IMO. It takes something like 3 extra
button presses to get to your own profile to see tracks you've reposted now. 1
song visible at a time in the stream as opposed to the old 5. Unnecessary
segmentation of playlists/songs from your profile. God the new app is
annoying.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "The old app was significantly better IMO."

I think that statement goes to show how bad the new app is - because the old
one was awful. I've been a pretty hardcore SC user since it first launched and
was mainly full of home recordings. The first app was pretty bad, then they
made it significantly worse with the new one. They also have 'pulse' for
creators which is inexplicably missing features you would expect it to have.

The original website was actually pretty good although by the time it came to
the release of the new one it hadn't been updated in a long long time. The new
one looks better but performs much worse. On a slow internet connection it is
completely unusable.

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eknight15
The iOS app is one of the current instances of form over function. It's far
too minimal. I use the web app and mobile app everyday, I much prefer the web
app.

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pducks32
I cannot stand to use SC's iOS app. The experience is slow in many respects.
Usually when I find hidden features in a design (like I often do with Apple's
design) I find that it enhances the experience, while with SC it just bugs me.
Like when I accidentally slip the song because I swiped too much.

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croissant
As a novice developer, I find it tremendously helpful reading about thought
processes and real-life development of apps. Does anyone know any more case
studies like this one? Perhaps, something more technical, too?

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johnyfav
I'm a dj in my part time and I feel that this app should be one of my most
used - it's not though. The timeline always is irrelevant, the app crashes,
the caching of music is annoying (I often drop network connectivity on the
commute to work and the app will freeze, forget where I'm at or drop out like
seconds in to the lack of network connectivity - despite having a good
connection for the last 5 minutes.)

I can't see who liked or shared my mixes or tracks. Comments are impossible.

And the search annoys me. I'll search for a friend as the timeline is so poor
and the auto complete must go on popularity and not even consider my
friends...

I could go on but I feel that many of the points have been mentioned before...

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chejazi
I don't have any experience using the old app, but I previously used
Soundcloud's web product. The main purpose was to listen to music made by more
esoteric artists. For more mainstream stuff, I turned to YouTube. Obviously
this setup was suited poorly for mobile.

Now I use the Soundcloud and Spotify apps for roughly the same respective
purposes (Spotify replacing YouTube). I prefer the simplicity of the
Soundcloud app over the feature-rich but complex Spotify app. There's plenty
of data not displayed in the Soundcloud app that might be shown in the Spotify
app, but good luck becoming consistent at finding that data.

Overall I'm happy they cleaned up the app and dropped the old webapp features.

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NN88
I hate it...they removed the information tab and made it ridiculously hard to
stay on the same "vein" of content you were listening to without going bak to
the home page.

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hans
yeh never understand why they cannot link desktop and mobile, not a mention of
the bridge pattern? is it hard or do you not like the desktop people? not a
mention of why is really daft. totally weird of them that ios has completely
different data it seems.

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mhmiles
Great write up. Any news on Chromecast support in the iOS app? Android app has
had it for a while.

