Web/Mobile App Critique

Apple Music App Review


The Apple Music app comes on every Apple iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Mac computer. The Apple Music app is also available for Android devices on the Google Play store. I am unsure of the features offered on the Android version, so this review will be for the app running on an iPhone. Features also vary on different Apple devices.

History

The Apple Music app has evolved over the years from iTunes. iTunes used to be an app where you could digitize your CDs and buy songs from the iTunes store. When it was iTunes, you could transfer your songs using a USB cable from your Mac or PC to your Apple portable iDevice. The older iTunes interface added movies and TV shows and was eventually broken into separate applications, Apple Music, Apple TV, and the iTunes Store. 

Apple had purchased Beats and incorporated much of Beats' existing technologies that used curated music lists to help users discover more music that was similar to what they liked. This coincided with Apple's attempt to get users to accept subscription-based streaming instead of making purchases in the iTunes store. 

Even though different applications were created to separate functions, the Apple Music application continued to gain features. These additional features add a lot of complexity to the application, making it difficult to navigate and find the music you want to listen to. 

The Interface

It appears to be simple at first glance. There are five tabs along the bottom, Listen Now, Browse, Radio, Library, and Search. In addition to the tabs at the bottom, a small bar slightly above the tabs will open to show three additional options: Lyrics, Airplay, and Up Next.

  • Listen Now will show different collections of songs based on what you have listened to. Apple uses artificial intelligence to create dynamic playlists that use various aspects of the songs you play and the songs you mark as Like or Unlike to create playlists with different mixes of your songs or your song along with similar music they expect you would like. Album covers or pleasing graphics make up a large portion of this scrollable screen.
  • Browse is like a news page for music. Apple curators will post popular albums and artists on this page to discover.
  • Radio has live broadcasts from different radio hosts with various genres of music, live interviews, and music-related topics.
  • Library will show the music you have purchased or marked to add to your library from the Apple Music subscription. There are various categories or filters which will show your music in different ways. You can view your music in playlists created by Artist, Album, Songs, Music Videos, and Genre. There is also a category called Made for You, a playlist Apple has built for you. This is like the functionality on the Listen Now tab. You can also choose to show only songs you've downloaded, which will play from your device instead of streaming. This is handy if you are without an internet connection.
  • Search will allow you to search for Artists, Songs, Albums, and Composers from Apple Music online or from your local library.

You have three more controls on the slide-up bar that hovers above the lower five tabs.

  • The icon on the left will show the song's lyrics. Many, but not all, of the songs' lyrics will scroll in time with the artist singing.
  • The center icon allows you to choose Airplay (wireless) compatible devices to play your music to. This can include speakers, TVs, and even playing back to a Mac computer's speakers.
  • The icon to the far right is a feature called Playing Next. This allows you to see what songs are coming up next. You can choose one of these and delete it if you don't want to hear it. This does not delete from the library.

The touchscreen can control the Apple Music app on your iPad, iPod or iPhone, or with a mouse on your computer, or using Siri Voice control on all of these devices. Siri voice control for Apple Music is additionally available on the Apple HomePod speakers, which do not have a display of their own. 

One additional song discovery option is Shazam which is built into Apple devices. You can ask Siri what song is playing, and Siri will usually display the song after a few seconds. A tap will take you to Apple Music where you can quickly add it to your library or directly to a playlist. As you will no doubt see, I have many K-pop songs in my library. While watching some Korean K-Dramas on Netflix, I found many songs I liked. Siri found most of them and allowed me to add them to my library without even stopping watching the show.

Subscription or Purchased Music

I resisted music subscription for many years, amassing a collection of about 9,000 songs I own. I finally gave in when I started discovering a lot of new songs. The subscription allows me to listen to Apple's songs as often as I want. I can also download songs to my device to play without an internet connection. This is handy while traveling on a plane.

Apple has several tiers of pricing, which I think is very competitive with competitors such as Pandora and Amazon Music Unlimited. The Music package alone has four different tiers, in addition to being bundled with other services.

There is a plan for $4.99 per month for Apple HomePods, which are wireless speakers similar to Amazon Echo or Sonos. If you only have a HomePod, then there would not be a computer or other visual interface. All commands to play music are through Siri only.

The full Apple Music plan is $9.99, which allows a single user to use Apple Music with over 90 million available songs on any device. If a user has multiple computers, iPads, iPods, iPhones, and HomePod, the music is available on all of your devices for no additional charge. College students can get this same plan for only $5.99 per month.

A family plan includes the same features for up to 6 family members for $14.99 a month. Each user can manage their separate playlists and libraries.

Apple also has additional single-user or family bundles at different price levels, including Apple Music and additional bundled services, including iCloud storage, Apple Arcade (gaming apps), Apple TV+, News, and Fitness+.

A separate feature called Music Match, for $24.95 a year, will allow songs you have imported from CDs to be synced to your library in the cloud. Music Match is handy if you have songs not ordinarily available in Apple's library. I used to buy many imported albums that are not normally available in the US music catalogs. Since I imported them with CDs, they still sync to my other devices.

Throughout the app, additional subtle ellipsis controls offer dozens of more control options, such as liking a song, adding it to a playlist, going directly to the lyrics, sharing the song, or sharing the lyrics, and many others.

Feature Overload

The additional hidden controls are some of what make the application very difficult to use. The worst thing about the app on the iPhone is that once you add a song to a playlist, you cannot change the order on your iPhone. Not being able to drag a title into another order is a terrible oversight for the device that pioneered dragging, pinching, and swiping with your finger. If you want to change the order of the playlist, you must go to a mac computer that is synced with the same Apple Music account. It's straightforward with the mouse to drag and drop songs. Once you change the order, it will sync to iCloud and back down to your other devices. The sync time can vary and requires an internet connection. There is also no obvious way to create a 'Playing Next' list. You can select the ellipsis on a song and choose to play it next or last. If you keep adding to one of these options, it will continue to build the playing next list.

Recommended Improvements

As improvements, I would first suggest that the app be given the ability to drag a song up or down in a playlist to re-order it. I would also like to see some of the existing controls be allowed to be optional. For example, I do not use Browse or Radio at all. The last request would be a quicker way to choose the speakers I want to stream to. If I want to play songs to an airplay speaker, it always seems not to want to connect to the speaker unless a piece is ready to play. I press play and then immediately pause it. I then open another window to get to the Airplay options, choose my speaker and then switch back to the play controls to start the song.

Overall, I like the app, and although there are some irritations, the music quality and ease of finding music are significant benefits. 

Competitors

Two large competitors mentioned by classmates are Amazon Prime Music and Pandora. I have heard similar complaints about the inability or difficulty in changing playlist order with Amazon music, but I have not had the chance to verify that for myself. Amazon does include a limited music selection with its Prime subscription service.

 Update: After this review, Apple has updated the app. When you click to edit your playlist, there are now small handles that will appear on each song that will allow you to manually change the playlist order. These handles used to be on each song in the playlist without needing to enter an edit mode. I can only guess there were complaints that the songs were too easy to move out of order. 

After discovering this edit feature in Apple Music, I tested the Amazon Prime Music app and discovered the same functionality exists. You must choose from the vertical ellipsis button to edit your playlist, and then you will see drag handles allowing you to change the sort order.