I see a lot of hate for the Spotify UI and on desktop & web I think it's kinda justified just because they've flip & flopped so much and remove/added/changed features constantly.
The Iphone & Ipad client I actually think is pretty well designed and I'm not sure where the hate is coming from, would be interesting if you could go into more detail
Best example I have is the whole navigation structure (this is on iPhone). Let's say you were listening to a playlist and then you went into an artist, maybe a related artist from there and played a song (basically, you've gone pretty deep). You now decide to search for a song and play that. In order to do that, you need to hit the back button repeatedly until the hamburger icon appears. Then, you can search and listen to the track you wanted. If you want to return to where you were previously, you need to hit the back button repeatedly until you get the hamburger, then redo every step you took to get there.
How is this fixable? Really easily! It's built-in! There's a UITabBarController that is used in many apps, such as iTunes, for this exact purpose. You can switch between sections of an app without losing your place in each section.
Ah that's a good point, thanks! Consistent navigation is the crux of many apps. Though with the phone version i find 99% of my use is either listening to my playlists or searching & placing specific song, so I seldom hit all those use cases that I do on the desktop version. I can imagine it being quite poor at those edge cases however.
The Iphone & Ipad client I actually think is pretty well designed and I'm not sure where the hate is coming from, would be interesting if you could go into more detail