Apple Music’s problems aren’t just skin-deep, and iOS 10 probably won’t fix them

There was news this morning that Apple would be revamping Apple Music just a year after its launch with a brand new black-and-white design.

The new look would ‘ditch’ the original colourful look and turn the UI’s attention to ‘huge’ album art and contrasting text. I don’t know what that latter remark could possibly refer to, currently album art in Apple Music is already huge.

But there is a point to be made about Apple Music’s colourful, and perhaps confusing design. By moving to a Spotify-like desaturated interface Apple Music could possibly become more consistent, with the report hinting at ‘larger, black, bold text for menus and tabs’. At the moment Apple Music’s UI is influenced by album art, which I kinda love and will miss.

9-to-5-Mac also say that ‘For You’ will also be simplified, while the ‘New’ tab will be replaced entirely by a ‘Browse’ tab. ‘Beats 1’ and ‘Connect’ will be unchanged. All important changes.

But ignoring the possible design changes, the thing I’m most concerned about from this report is the lack of details on any behind-the-scenes changes to the app.

Apple Music’s biggest problem, from the beginning, has been its backend. From day one it’s just been iTunes and iTunes Match, which was already horribly buggy, strapped to a streaming library of music.

Compared to Spotify the service has trouble with even the most basic of tasks. Streaming music can be slow. The app’s download function is unreliable. Videos choke your connection. Even Apple’s own content-factory, Beats 1, has started to upload videos to YouTube instead of their own Apple Music Connect page. As of last night you could only watch Apple Music’s exclusive Drake interview on Google’s YouTube.

There’s problems with Apple Music’s match function — explicit and live versions of albums in my library have been lost or replaced. And even today it’s hard to trust Apple Music to sync playlist or library changes to more than one device without losing a track or losing the album or playlist entirely.

Sonos and Android versions of the app are also just as buggy, the Android app being especially broken, but I digress.

These are not design or UI issues. They’re fundamental problems with the haphazard construction of Apple Music as a service. And since Apple is notoriously bad at cloud services to begin with, the rush to release Apple Music in such a broken state always was baffling.

Apple Music’s UI here is, at worst, confusing and sometimes dishonest. But it isn’t really a problem. Apple Music’s content is, in my opinion, amazing. But if June comes around with just a fresh coat of lipstick on the pig of Apple Music then what’s the point.