No, Spotify isn't trying to screw over iPhone users
As a Spotify user, I was pleased to see the iOS version of the streaming music app get a much needed facelift last week. The new design is slick and much easier to use than the previous version, and I've had no issues with playing my music as usual, which is why I was so confused to see this headline from ITWorld: Spotify to iPhone subscribers: Drop dead (cached version here).
Looking past the obnoxious title and teaser that insists Spotify has "a nasty surprise" in store for iPhone users, the article is completely wrong.
Before the latest iPhone update, when you came across an album you wanted to play, it was simple to do: Tap and you play it, one song after another, in the order in which they're on the album. What could be simpler?
That's not the case after the iPhone update, though. There's no longer a button for playing an album from start to finish. Instead, there's a Shuffle Play button. Tap it, and Spotify shuffles the order of the tracks on the album, playing them randomly.
The story, which was written by Preston Gralla, goes on to suggest some sort of evil scheme to force paying Spotify subscribers with iPhones to use the same music playback options as free users.
How about paying Spotify users? They're left out in the cold. They have the same interface as non-paying users. I tried logging out and then logging back in again after the upgrade, hoping that would solve the problem. It didn't.
Fortunately, none of this is actually true; To play an album from start to finish in Spotify's newly redesigned app you simply tap on the first song in the album. That's literally all there is to it. The rest of the songs then play in order just as you'd expect. This is the same thing you'd do with just about any other music app, and prior to Spotify's new update, tapping on the first song in an album worked the exact same way.
So no, Spotify isn't out to screw over iPhone subscribers, and I'm not sure where Gralla's confusion was born, but it's an unwarranted alarm.
