Apple has updated the music app for the iPhone to include their new subscription music service. That’s fine. I don’t personally want to use a subscription music service, preferring to buy my music, but it’s easy enough to deactivate in the settings menu. They also gave the app a visual makeover, another fine thing to do. My problem is, the visuaI makeover seems to have introduced UI inconsistencies. That is not fine.
There are now an unpredictable number of hierarchies between me and my music. If I have my music sorted by artist, I’ve currently no idea what I’m going to see when I tap on an artists name. For example, if I tap Simon & Garfunkel, I get a collapsed list of albums that I have to tap on to see track names:
But if I tap on The Submarines, I get a scrollable list of tracks with the albums as floating headings:
Personally I would prefer it to always work as it does for The Submarines–a hybrid album and track view–which is how the old app worked. But more than anything I want it to be consistent. Not knowing what UI I’m going to encounter from artist to artist keeps me from developing muscle memory, and creates occasional frustration when I’m trying to play a specific song. If I can’t remember which Simon & Garfunkel album “Cecelia” is, I used to be able to just scroll until I saw it. Now I have to search, either by hand through the albums or by typing in the name. That delay between deciding what I want to listen to and being able to find it is new, and unwelcome.
Anyone know how to fix this?