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A simple tweak to Spotify's iOS app makes navigation a lot easier

Spotify picked up one of the oldest UI design standards for iOS.

Spotify is the leading streaming music service -- despite the fact that its app design has always left something to be desired. Things have improved in the last year or two, but by and large its apps are not easy to navigate. However, a seemingly simple UI update that rolled out to the iOS app today actually makes things a lot easier. The app's main navigation buttons -- home, browse, search, radio and library -- have all been moved from a slide-out menu on the left to the bottom of the app's interface. After the change, it now resembles Apple Music and a host of other iOS apps.

The best part about this change is that before, it was overly difficult to get back to those main navigation buttons if you had started digging into albums or playlists. The menu that slide out from the left was buried away, inaccessible unless you hit the "back" button to retrace your steps. It was frustrating that the side menu wasn't universally accessible, but this update changes all of that.

Spotify can still be a rather confusing app at times: "home," "browse" and "discover" all have plenty of duplicate content, for example, but this makes things a bit cleaner for sure. And a complicated user experience is just about par for the course these days -- Just ask anyone who's spent time with Apple Music or SoundCloud Go.