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Ask HN: Why is Apple Music lightyears behind Spotify from a technical POV?

7 points by carlycue ↗ HN
I used Spotify briefly on an iPhone 13 Pro and I immediately felt how responsive everything was. Loading playlists, playing a track, searching, loading other types of content. It's shocking how good Spotify's streaming tech is. Then I went back to Apple Music again and I immediately felt how slow and unoptimised everything was in comparison.

From a technical perspective, how is Spotify, which has a 100 times smaller market cap, able to completely demolish Apple in streaming technology?

7 comments

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RichardHesketh
Because Apple has that many more products on which to focus. Spotify lives or dies by it’s streaming service. The same is not true for Apple and Apple Music, although services are an increasingly important part of their portfolio.
jamil7
I'm only speculating, but a couple of things come to mind. Although they're getting better and hiring, Apple has in general struggled with cloud, and Spotify likely has more expertise and talent there. It's not clear to me how much, but there appears to be quite a few pieces of the old iTunes codebase lurking around. I wonder how much of the backend has also been repurposed for something it wasn't designed for, making it difficult to work with.
recvonline
I would assume tech debt.

Apple: Bring iTunes to the cloud Spotify: Start with the cloud and bring Music on

I still like the way Apple "views" Music, I like browsing Artists etc. on Apple Music, but I love you responsive Spotify is.

ralston3
Maybe music streaming isn't a technical problem so much though?

Anecdote: I've been a paying Spotify premium subscriber for the past 10 years. I finally switched to Apple Music recently. Why? My favorite song, from my favorite artist (well known, national U.S. artist) is inexplicably unavailable on Spotify - but available on Apple Music.

So maybe Apple is light years behind technically because they see it as a partnerships game as opposed to a technical game.

moooo99
I‘m not sure if the benefit of exclusive licensing in music streaming is as big as it is in video streaming.

The portfolio available on Spotify (and any other streaming service) is so huge, even if one major artist is missing, you’re still pretty much guaranteed to find something you enjoy.

This is purely anecdotal, but looking at me and many of my peers: many people don’t even have a favorite artist anymore. At least no artist they care enough about to switch streaming platforms for.

frou_dh
Apple don't seem to be particularly great at making new GUI applications these days. I suspect a lot of their old guard staff has finally moved on, and the institutional knowledge in that area has suffered.
RealPlastic
Apple Music is much slower since they moved to server-side authentication. Every single request has to be sent to the server, authenticated, retrieved, then sent back the end-user. Add a song to playlist sometimes takes a lot longer than expected. Do not add the song a second time while waiting or it will show up on the playlist twice. Songs stop playing for no apparent reason - I suspect its due to your session needing to be authenticated quite often and this can cause the music to stop. Personal radio station loads X songs, then plays them in a loop until you can be authenticated and make another request for another group of X songs to be played.

As someone with a background in QA, I can only assume they do all their testing under "ideal conditions" so they do not notice the (sometimes frustrating) lag time for end-users.