What's wrong with software developers? [Spotify Edition]

This title is partly a legitimate question and partly me throwing a jab at software in the age-old hardware vs. software rivalry 😁.  I'm just joking.  There are good people on both sides.  Some of my best friends are software engineers.  Mrs. Wisdumb is a software engineer.  See, I can't possibly be anti-software!   Coders, I threw you a bone with this Hollywood depiction of coding shown above so you can go on your own rant about public perception of your field.  

The impetus for this post comes courtesy of Spotify.  Spotify bought one of my favorite podcasts, Armchair Expert, and made it exclusive to their platform.  Initially, I was horrified at this.  My memories of Spotify are listening to music and then getting blasted with an ad that was twice as loud as the music I was listening to.  

I believe this was intentional.  That is, it wasn't the fault of a software bug, but rather a design choice by sales and management.  I swore off Spotify for that reason.  I'm not going to pay money to a company with behavior like that.  It's like paying off kidnappers or negotiating with terrorists.   

Despite my reservations, I wanted to continue listening to the podcast, so I downloaded the Spotify app again.  Thankfully, they don't blast ads at high volume on anymore.  At least not on podcasts.  I don't know if they still do on music as I haven't tried listening to any on that app again.  I decided to move all the podcasts I listen to (not very many) over to that app so I could have them in one place and help limit app overload on my phone.

I'm going to start off with a compliment- there is a feature in the app that, as best I can determine, detects when I'm driving and auto-skips ads.  This is great!  I'm guessing this is a safety feature to prevent people from looking at their phone and skipping forward while driving.  End of compliment.  My light googling has not turned up any documentation of this as a feature, though.  If it is a feature, it seems to be buggy.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes it works even if I am just out for a walk and not in a car.  Sometimes it just skips to the end of the podcast and marks it as played, so you have to go back and search through it to find your place again.  

This is not what I'm here to complain about.  These are run-of-the-mill software bugs.  

They shouldn't be there, but they are unfortunately a reality in today's corporate world that rushes software out the door with little or no QA.  I'm not paying for the app, so I don't really have any right to complain.  If I cared enough, I could reach out to customer support and let them know about the bugs.  I expect they are already aware of them.  You get a free pass on this one, programmers.

What really inspired this post is a much more serious problem in Spotify's development and management departments.  When you download podcasts, it puts them in "Your Episodes" folder in the app.  The problem is they provide no ability to sort them by ascending release date.  They will only sort in descending order.  So, if you download episodes 1, 2, 3 and 4 of a podcast, 1 is at the bottom of the list and 4 is at the top because it is the most recent.  You can't change this!  

If you play 1, when you reach the end, it either stops playing or jumps over to some music or something.  It won't go to the previous item in the list (episode 2).  You have to open the app and manually select episode 2.  Then episode 3, and so on.  Not great when you are driving.

This flaw is pretty unbelievable.  I figured I just didn't know how to use the app correctly rather than they omitted this capability from their product.  I went to the Spotify website to figure out what I was doing wrong.  A search of their forums turned up a few matching results and other people with the same question, including a response from Spotify with a link to go vote for this as an enhancement request.  I checked it out- the post was about a year old and had 14 thumbs up when I saw it.  It had already been closed by Spotify as not having enough votes to be considered.  What?!  

I understand needing to prioritize features, but for something like this, it ought to be a no-brainer to prioritize.  I don't know how many people go to the effort to find Spotify's forums and then search around enough to find this link register on their forums and then give it an up vote, but I'm sure there are many more people wanting this basic functionality than the 14 who went to that effort.  The fact that whoever is handling the customer service for this product doesn't recognize this isn't an enhancement but a serious flaw in their app is especially worrisome.  They must not even use their own product!  There were comments in the support thread pointing this out.  The response from their tech support:

Hey!
We've been keeping an eye on this submission for an extended period of time, and it doesn't seem this will reach the votes necessary to put it forward for prioritization.
As such, we're marking this case as closed. This includes any similar suggestions that are received.

And how can management let this happen?  Do none of them actually use their own product either?  They obviously are going after the podcast market hard by paying big bucks for popular podcasts so they can make them exclusive to Spotify.  Maybe they should spend a few bucks on a software contractor to add some code to their app to actually make it functional.  

 

Imagine Ford designing a new car and only including features that someone suggested on their website if they get enough votes.  Somebody requests matte black paint.  That gets a lot of votes, so they include it.  Another person wants a sunroof and that gets a lot of votes, so it gets designed in.  Nobody thinks to submit that they want wheels on the car as that seems so obvious, you shouldn't have to request it.  So, they don't include any provisions for wheels.  Even worse, after the car comes out with no wheels and a customer or two suggests they add some, they decline because not enough people have found their suggestion box and requested it and they don't think it is worth their time to develop it.

Instead of providing a link to that request and sending my hordes of readers to that thread to up-vote it so it has a chance of being implemented, I would rather see Spotify fall on their face and fail.  I tried to help them with my vote and comment, but they did not accept my Wisdumb, and must now suffer the consequences.  I have since moved all my podcasts (except for Armchair Expert since it is locked to Spotify) to another podcast app.  A free one that has all the necessary features, including sorting ability and more.  It was probably developed by a lone, competent hardware engineer throwing some code together in his or her free time 😜.  Too bad Spotify can't find any of those.