New fullscreen artwork on iOS

[stevo168]

I've noticed that Spotify now automatically goes into Full Sreen artwork and the on-screen controls disppear when playing the playlist 'Today's Top Hits'.

I don't like not having the controls on screen but I've noticed that some users do like this feature. Can you make this a personalisation feature that users can turn on or off.

[aesterling]

There are four things I dislike about this change:

1. The album art is displayed full screen so the edges are cropped and only the middle is visible. As a result, the text or images are often cut off and unreadable.
2. The song name and artist are not visible until you tap on the screen, and then only temporarily.
3. This is not an optional or personalization feature. Users currently have no control over enabling, disabling, or customizing it.
4. This view is currently only appearing in some places. For example, I see it when playing from "Release Radar" but not "New Music Friday." 

That said, I do like that the song name and artist text serves as a link to the album or artist's page. I also like seeing the album art larger, but wish it remained square and uncropped.

Here are two screenshots of the new playback screen.

[stevo168]

I'm happy to report the full screen artwork has been removed and the controls are consistent again as of version 8.4.11 on iOS.

[aesterling]

Interesting, I just updated to 8.4.11 on iOS and I'm still seeing the full screen behavior, but still only on the "Release Radar" playlist.

[stevo168]

Very interesting indeed. I just tried the Release Radar playlist and it seems normal again.

[aesterling]

Maybe Spotify is doing A/B testing with different users to test the feature? Hopefully it goes back to regular for me soon, too!

[stevo168]

It would appear I spoke too soon 😞

[aesterling]

I searched the Spotify Community again and found a handful of other posts in both the Android and iOS pages talking about the same design change.

Here's an article on AndroidPolice.com talking about what we're seeing. Plus, here are a few other posts about the design change. Some people love it, some people hate it.

Like I said in my first post, if those problems I mentioned are addressed, I think it could be a cool feature!

[johsteele]

PLEASE let us turn this fullscreen album art off the play screen! It looks terrible, all blurry, I keep thinking something is glitchy in the app. 

[jonwestcott]

Restarted the app and my iPhone thinking something had gone wrong! Artwork cropped all wrong.. Wierd ‘feature’...

[Olatron]

Just to add my voice... i hate it. Luckily it seems to be limited to my time capsule playlist. 

If spotify are listening - i hated this enough to register and post here for the first time. Please can you not force this change and make it an option. 

P.S. where is lossless.. please hurry 😉

[Miggyluv]

If this becomes a standard user interface change I'll cancel my subscription. It's awful!

[Justinseals]

This is an incredibly annoying feature!

Spotify is foremost a music listening application, listening to music and contorling the music is NUMBER ONE priority, the app looking good must come as number two.

I now need to tap twice to be able to pause or see more information for the song, or to save the song, or add it to a playlist etc.

I listen to music in the car all the time with my phone on a windshield holder, being able to pause quickly, glance quickly at the name of the song without tapping etc is GREAT.

Sure, seeing more of the album art is a nice bonus, but not to the sacrifice of app functionality. What Spotify did before maximising space for artwork while retaining the controls at the bottom was great, continue to maximise artwork space if you want, but don't remove controls.

Please fix this. Or at least give us controls to turn this feature off!

[robalf910]

hmm can't you just slide to move to the next song? That is how mine is working.

[jlscurry]

You can indeed slide to the next song. The problem for me is having to click twice to access menu options. Also, I've noticed that on certain playlists, music videos are inserted in lieu of songs now as part of this redesign. When it's playing the music video, you can't simply click the add button to add the song to your music. And you cannot access the artist/album page through the menu button. I also get the feeling (though I'm not certain) that this new app version is probably drawing more data and battery life due to it's increased multimedia design. [Though this last part may not be true.]

[dudemanxx]

No one has even touched on the fact that you cannot access your queue during playback of one of these stylized playlists. You also cannot swipe to queue, if on iOS. These are huge features to trade for the clumsy, enlarged album art and what are essentially artisinal gifs that have taken their place. Please, at the very least, offer an option to always stick to the plain and simple UI. Why remove core functions of the app for certain playlists? Dumb, dumb, dumb. We can turn the seldom used Stranger Things overlay on and off, but not the UI that seems to plague more and more playlists every day? Where's the sense in that?