Since iOS 7, Apple's UI design has taken several steps backward and Apple's new music app has made a helluva lot of terrible UI choices.
The biggest design crime: the transparent status bar over the album art. Incredibly distracting and partially obscures the content, which violates Apple's own GUI guidelines. Why did Apple Music's designer feel that it was necessary to have the status bar amped on the album art. I thought the whole point of having these nice (and larger retina displays) was the better alleviate the content and I wanna be able to see the album artwork in its full glory and not have the signal and battery info hanging over it. The Now Playing screen for the most part is beautiful but goddamn that transparent status bar really ***** irks me. So un-Apple in terms of design.
Removed features: Why was landscape mode removed if they had nothing good to replace it with? The landscape mode in iOS 7-8.3 was not that great and I would love to see CoverFlow return but don't remove it if you don't have nothing valuable to take its place. Just another reason why Apple's UI designers are so half-assed lately (it was never like this with Forstall around). Another feature removed for no reason: Shake-to-shuffle. I thought this was a great feature as I could easily change up the shuffle with a simple shake and it was very convenient. Also, this feature was always optional so why remove it completely? Removing features is also very un-Apple like and has convinced me of how poorly thought-out this app is.
Streamlining and customizing: In the old music app, you could customize the bottom tabs but not anymore and since I generally used my iPhone as my iPod, the new music app completely sidelines my personal library, why can't some of the features but moved into their own apps? For instance Radio should be its own app. Remove the connect feature since it's just a successful as Ping was. And have the curation and recommendation stuff be integrated into the iTunes Store. I just want a simple and clean music player on my iPhone.
One last detail: The new app icon is an absolute eyesore. Why change it? They already improved on it in iOS 8-8.3 and it actually looked good and was easily distinguishable on the home screen. Was it really necessary to try and fix something that was already fixed? Now it's just another dull mostly-white icon like Calendar, Safari, Health, etc. and is now one of the ugliest icons on the homescreen.
I always thought the Music app from iOS 7-8.3 was a piece of work but honestly, I'd take it over to POS that is the new Music app. It's really sad that these are the same people who created the iPod and iTunes (before it got bloated) and they haven't made a good default music app since iOS 6. The music app is the biggest deal breaker for me in terms of having an iPhone. The iPhone used to be the best music playing phone on the market, now it's just as mediocre as the rest of them. Very disappointed in Apple lately and I hope they swallow their pride and give us a redesigned UI worthy of being on an Apple OS. Until then, I won't use my iPhone for music...
The biggest design crime: the transparent status bar over the album art. Incredibly distracting and partially obscures the content, which violates Apple's own GUI guidelines. Why did Apple Music's designer feel that it was necessary to have the status bar amped on the album art. I thought the whole point of having these nice (and larger retina displays) was the better alleviate the content and I wanna be able to see the album artwork in its full glory and not have the signal and battery info hanging over it. The Now Playing screen for the most part is beautiful but goddamn that transparent status bar really ***** irks me. So un-Apple in terms of design.
Removed features: Why was landscape mode removed if they had nothing good to replace it with? The landscape mode in iOS 7-8.3 was not that great and I would love to see CoverFlow return but don't remove it if you don't have nothing valuable to take its place. Just another reason why Apple's UI designers are so half-assed lately (it was never like this with Forstall around). Another feature removed for no reason: Shake-to-shuffle. I thought this was a great feature as I could easily change up the shuffle with a simple shake and it was very convenient. Also, this feature was always optional so why remove it completely? Removing features is also very un-Apple like and has convinced me of how poorly thought-out this app is.
Streamlining and customizing: In the old music app, you could customize the bottom tabs but not anymore and since I generally used my iPhone as my iPod, the new music app completely sidelines my personal library, why can't some of the features but moved into their own apps? For instance Radio should be its own app. Remove the connect feature since it's just a successful as Ping was. And have the curation and recommendation stuff be integrated into the iTunes Store. I just want a simple and clean music player on my iPhone.
One last detail: The new app icon is an absolute eyesore. Why change it? They already improved on it in iOS 8-8.3 and it actually looked good and was easily distinguishable on the home screen. Was it really necessary to try and fix something that was already fixed? Now it's just another dull mostly-white icon like Calendar, Safari, Health, etc. and is now one of the ugliest icons on the homescreen.
I always thought the Music app from iOS 7-8.3 was a piece of work but honestly, I'd take it over to POS that is the new Music app. It's really sad that these are the same people who created the iPod and iTunes (before it got bloated) and they haven't made a good default music app since iOS 6. The music app is the biggest deal breaker for me in terms of having an iPhone. The iPhone used to be the best music playing phone on the market, now it's just as mediocre as the rest of them. Very disappointed in Apple lately and I hope they swallow their pride and give us a redesigned UI worthy of being on an Apple OS. Until then, I won't use my iPhone for music...
