Maybe I'm old but I'm really getting annoyed with apps becoming so bloated with features. The podcast integration was part of why I left Spotify. I was tired of having podcasts pop up on my home screen. Tidal luckily is free from this for the moment.
It's also weird because that was the whole idea of the smartphone app economy, after all. Have a specialized app for every purposes, then install the apps you want and hence the use cases you want to cover.
I don't even mind Spotify having podcasts and music, just that it should be Spotify Music and Spotify Podcasts.
I'm of the same opinion. I'm tired of every app trying to take all my attention and do everything to the point where they do nothing well.
I want a video app, a music app, and a podcast app. I left YouTube Music for Tidal because I got tired of YT Music trying to push too many bloated features.
Yeah it literally can't do its one main job well, I now ran into the Spotify bug that has been reported since 2017 and resurfaced again the past month for a lot of people:
After playing one song, skipping or letting the next song play, the sound is muted without any indication at all and you have to scrub the time then restart the song to get it back.
That is literally your 1 main job Spotify! That is literally what you do: play music. It can't even do that anymore. Not to mention that since forever, the bug still exists that storing Spotify music on an SD card results in needing to redownload and re-move your entire downloaded library when your phone restarts. It is like when the google pixel 3a had a bug where the cell calling simply didn't work or was perpetually muted Like, that is the basic functionality.
Oh and then there is also the bug that with a bad internet connection, you literally can't load into the app and see/play your downloaded library without putting your phone in airplane mode and force stopping and restarting the app.
Spotify has become so trash trying to do everything and squeeze profit every place possible and made their app barely usable in the meantime.