The new Music app is its worst iteration yet. The dynamic coloring of the last UI has been discarded for another blindingly white app. On the now playing screen, the album artwork has a massive drop shadow while music is playing:
When you pause it, the artwork
inexplicably shrinks and falls onto the surface. Dragging the scrubber also causes the
artwork to shrink.
Repeat and shuffle are now hidden out of view, despite an excess of white space. They can now be found on the Up Next menu, which can be called upon by dragging the Now Playing screen up:
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However, there is no indicator that you can even scroll up on the Now Playing screen.
Throughout the rest of the app, Apple continues to dump core features like Playlists, Artists, and Songs into a single Library tab while Apple Music features get shoved in front. The "Hide Apple Music" setting does nothing right now, but in iOS 9 it automatically caused a Playlists button to appear in the tab bar. I'm hoping that will still be the case with the finished version of iOS 10.
The new app overaddresses the touchability issues in the last version. Some buttons that were too hard to press in the iOS 9 version have been fixed. The scrubber on the Now Playing screen increases in size once pressed, making it easier to slide around. It also no longer spreads from edge to edge, making it easier to scrub to the beginning or end of a song. But other adequately sized buttons have also been pumped up in size, like the list view, causing it to show less content than before. The Library view has massive bold headers that look nothing like the rest of the OS. Rather than spread out the lockscreen controls to prevent incorrect touches, Apple just increased them in size. The bizarre growing/shrinking animation from the Now Playing screen is also present when pausing and playing music on the lockscreen.
The original Music app was great. From its inception through iOS 6, the app was straightforward, easy to use, and nice to look at. Apple wrecked it in iOS 7, took some steps forward in iOS 8.4 and then dumped it all again for the worst version yet. The iOS 9 app wasn't perfect but it was a solid foundation to grow from. Apple did not need to trash it entirely for yet another inferior iteration of the app.
