UI design changes

Feature requests
1

Feature description:

Buttons

  • Interface > Advanced. Setting rounded corners to disabled does not disable the rounded corner radius for the Buttons, Would like this setting to affect the button radius as well.

  • Button inner padding setting to increase overall button size.

Album Page

  • Header buttons: It would be more a much more viable option to place only the Play and Shuffle options as equal spaced half-full-width styled buttons and Icon actions (icons without button style outline) below it for (4) more actions (ex:- Shuffle, Like, Queue, Mix, Hamburger Icon). The rest should go into the hamburger menu to avoid clutter. Currently the icons (Like button) are placed right on top of the Album Artwork, which is a bad idea since it’s not very accessible (especially with one hand) being at the very top of the screen. Tidal does this well.

image

  • Would be better to not implement any buttons in the future which is placed directly on top of the artwork, obstructing it. (or atleast provide customizability options for it).

  • Album credits as an option in the hamburger bottom chip menu

Artist Page:

  • Artist banner should be placed at the very top with a light gray vertical gradient applied towards the bottom.

  • Options in interface settings to disable the Album desciription, track count and duration that appears below the Artist Name. (Ex: 15 albums . 114 tracks . 6:59:39)

  • Same header buttons idea as Album page, Play, Shuffle, and icons beneath.

image

  • Missing Customize size and padding option of album items in interface settings.

  • Customizability options to reorder items. (Top tracks on top etc)

Playlist page

  • Buttons coverup Playlist artwork (move hamburger icon as an NavigationBar icon.)
  • Same idea as album page, A big play and shuffle button at the top with 4 IconButtons at the bottom.

MediaItem List

  • A swipe-to-action feature for the media items to quick add a song to the
    queue. This is possibly one of the best and most used features in
    Spotify.
  • View Song credits in hamburger menu

Search

  • Toggle to remove headers for List items. (ex:- Album artists, Albums)
  • Toggle to increase padding between each item and increase icon size.

Full-Screen Player for Now Playing

  • Redesign screens such that buttons don’t cover album artwork, and are not placed at the very top of the screen.
  • Settings for default and Large size for height of the progress indicator. To make it a bit more thicker.

I would also propose to add a new Style that goes like this:-

<  Now Playing: <Album Name>

                        Image
------------------   Progress Bar ---------------------
Title                                                ❤ 
Artist
<additional content, stars etc>

<shuffle> <prev> <pause> <next> <repeat>
<queue>  <lyrics> <share>  <menu>

Problem solved:

Accessibility, Ease of navigation with one hand.
Lack of configurability.

Brought benefits:

Currently the app is packed with features and customization options yet the UI still feels and falls flat in some sections. My suggestions can be easily implemented into the App and also make the app feel and look better, which will also increase positive user engagement. Some of the suggestions also improve ease of use.

Changes also suggest a slight deviation from Material3 guidelines that follows a rounded pattern since some m3 components look janky subjectively & Material2 was terrible as well.

Material3 Looks great for apps such as Clock calculator or Gmail but apps like these should really make their own design components, or at least modify them heavily. None of the material3 music apps I’ve seen look as good as Spotify, Tidal and other apps that follow their own design scheme. YT music is also relatively worse in everyway compared to Tidal and Spotify UI-wise, some people like it, and some people seriously hate it, Hence why customization options would be really great.

I also have massive respect for your hard work on this app, the most feature rich stable music app there is out there. Thank you.

Other application solutions:

 

 

Additional description and context:

 

 

Screenshots / Mockup:

    

2

At this point you want to use another app with another UX paradigm.

Many Symfonium users think Spotify UI is not that good and prefer Symfonium approach.

BTW every actions are accessible from 3 dots menu when there’s icons over images.

3

Could you atleast just add the custom player layout and the swipe-to-action mentioned?

4

All that’s been asked really is changing the button style, headers, and some minor configurability options. (I’m assuming you haven’t read most of it)

From a programming standpoint I don’t think these configuration changes would take ages to implement.
A lot are just missing configuration options you haven’t provided yet (size of albums in artist page etc). You could probably ignore the button radius and headers and implement the rest. Those fall within the current UI design.

I’ve done those features myself using Compose in a local music app I’ve made.

I’d be willing to help make these changes if possible

5

Actually yes I take time to read … But you have probably not searched for previous features requests :wink:

When you have made an app for a few millions users, come back explaining what you’ve learned about maintainibility and scalability …

6

Sure, these changes depend on the codebase in itself but I was under the assumption the codebase was scalable. But yeah I’d understand, you’re working on this alone and you have tons of requests and other work so I’m fine if you ever think it over and implement some of these in the future.

Thank you anyways.

7

The problem is never to add an if somewhere, it’s to handle every different combination of things to ensure they work and have no regression after every other changes.

And there’s consistency to reduce support, if a function like swipe only works in a screen because well this can’t work on grids then it triggers support. This have costs too.

Building successfull app on Play Store is hard and complex and barely makes money to justify the time passed.

8

Yeah haha, I completely understand that, I know it’s not easy at all to maintain such an app and also ensure QA as well.

Either ways, the swipe feature you could probably just enable for components in the List hierarchy. But yeah, given the amount of different layouts for MediaItems it’s going to be much more difficult, I didn’t take that into consideration.

Either ways, the app still has a pleasant user experience and I’ve yet to see any reason to use Plexamp, Spotify or Tidal when I already have symfonium. I’ve cancelled both Spotify and Tidal subscriptions a while ago favoring this app. Only the UI can be a tad bit better, which isn’t a problem anyways.

9

One thing I’d love is an example UI on the settings page, so you can see what setting changes actually do. Currently it’s all text, so it can be a bit of a mystery to what some settings actually do.