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Spotify has been serious about podcasting for some time now but it doesn’t feel like it. You can understand the rationale to keep their fingers in the multiple pies of the audio experience simultaneously but they are sacrificing quality for breadth. As an avid podcast listener, the Spotify listening experience is painful. The current UI makes listening to music easy and podcasts clunky. It’s reached a point where I think Spotify needs a dedicated podcast app.
Podcasts are completely different audio experience to songs
Music is Spotify’s first priority and that’s okay. Although, as a user when I open the app, it’s not always music first in my head and the disparity in user experience is evident immediately. You can see which audio experience is the afterthought. The gap between wanting to listen to a Podcast and play my favourite music playlists are far, far apart. Given the limited amount of real estate within an app screen, the design shouldn’t be split between two different forms of entertainment.
Opening Spotify to search for a podcast feels similar to how Netflix’s homepage throws you into the paradox of choice by…
