HereIAm

So I want to swap off of Spotify. Most of the time it works great, but the annoyances with their UX are starting to build up. From not ordering albums in release order on certain screens, to having to wait a good few seconds before turning off their shuffle+, and their shuffle not being very shuffle-y to begin with.

I have a couple of requirements:

• A decent Linux client.
• Be able to easily select playback device from other devices (for example start playback on my PC from my phone).
• Preferably pretty straightforward UX philosophy, i.e. haven't started going down any enshitification with AI, "we know best" kind of elements.

I don't particularly care for the highest of lossless quality audio. I don't posses any audio equipment where I would have any shot of telling the difference. As long as its not the experience I had with YouTube music where some random persons heavily compressed upload of a song would start playing.

My main contenders are Tidal, Qobuz, and deezer. The latter two I have very little experience with.

I've tried Tidal before, but my main gripe with it was scrolling through large playlists (about 2000 songs) was very slow, as it loaded in songs as you scrolled through (think endless scrolling on ddg or Lemmy) making it tedious to go to artists starting with a later character in the alphabet. Maybe it was just the Linux client, an issue on my machine, or if they've fixed it since, would be great to hear if any of you have had the same issue.

Qobuz and deezer I haven't really tried or heard much about from a users perspective.

I know some people swear by buying (or ship in under the jolly roger) all their music and use jellyfin or just local files for playback. I'm not very keen on that idea, the convince and discoverability of music on a streaming platform is what made me go to Spotify and away from winamp in the first place.

In a recent update to the HSBC app they've added a screen to prevent you from using the app unless you use the default (google) keyboard.

They do a similar thing if you have an accessibility service running that can access the screens content. A fair enough security warning if you've happened to install a dodgy keyboard app, but highly frustrating when using an open source alternative that enhances the security and privacy over the default option (HeliBoard in my case).

I haven't found a way to circumvent the page yet. It would be useful if Android allowed you to block the permission to query all packages, but alas.

But it seems to only do this in the home tab. Search and subscription tabs still show the view count.

Now I don't think view count is much of an indication of quality for a video, but the number of likes even less so. It varies quite a bit even on video to video from the same creator depending on if a like is called out for, or audience type.

Certainly not the most egregious change they've made, but a bit of an odd one I can't quite figure out why.