I’m going to cut to the chase.
The Music application on iOS is a mess from a usage and performance point of view. The application has been a constant crasher on my iPad mini (even after shutting it down completely and booting it up again). Scrolling content often times gets stuck as does search where it freezes the entire app (and then crashes). The user interface is also messy.
For one, the controls and navigation are tiny targets. Sure, tapping that area where the control is expands it to include the cover art and larger controls. The point is that the initial controls are all these tiny targets. And things that you would think would be clickable aren’t (like when similar artists are shown with their round icons in Apple Music). It’s like someone who has no clue on the Apple design ethos created this ugly and “complicated” mess. Then again, there was OS X Yosemite’s atrocious UI (I haven’t and won’t upgrade to it).
I’m actually beginning to believe this is the new norm for Apple software user interfaces though. OS X El Capitan is slightly better where it might be tolerable with some 3rd party software. But this Music application user interface is something else on iOS. It works a little better inside of the iTunes app (whose own UI has gotten uglier over the years).
As for the Apple Music part, I did mention I was going to put its system to the test by putting only my Japanese music on my test devices. As expected, the “For You” part has absolutely zero concept of this since once I selected my preferred genres, it could only present me with artists that are relevant from the western market point of view. This is even though I could find some JPOP using search. What I mean is while the number of Japanese and South Korean artists listed as being followable on the US Apple Music site is relatively small (like LUNA SEA, X Japan, ayaka, Girls’ Generation, BABYMETAL are there to name a few), you aren’t going to find their entire catalog there let alone, any actual curated content.
Again, I do get the business angle with different regional markets including licensing issues (and especially more so with the Japanese industry since it uses a completely different operational model where many label artists are considered employees of those respective labels). This would actually be an incredible nut for Apple to crack and break down these barriers since they are going to be operating Apple Music regionally (and it would be a feat if they could work out those business ended details where niches like myself could utilize the service in that manner).
I dunno, maybe that part is still a work in progress. I can do searches on Japanese and South Korean artists and so long as one of them has an actual profile, there are a whole lot of others that show up in the similar artists section (though non-clickable as is the case with even major western artists – that part works fine in iTunes on the desktop so maybe this is just a bug in the iOS app). So what I’m doing is playing what tracks are available and clicking the heart (doing the same with all of my music) and seeing how their computer and human curators deal with cases like me.
As it stands though, Apple Music’s largest “selling” point (human curated playlists based on what you actually listen to) is useless for someone like myself. What I also don’t want to see is what few licensed music be shoved into the “World Music” category that often happens. I do realize that folks like myself are a very small niche and that Apple Music will still be appealing for the vast majority of people. As for the application and user interface related issues, they really need to clean this up since it detracts from the entire user experience (and more so, the usual simplicity that Apple is known for).
