iOS 8.4, the windows vista of ipad

I like to listen to music while coding, with my normal strategy being "on a monday, pick an artist, leave them playing all week". It's a low-effort policy. Except iOS 8.4 has ruined my workflow.



Now while I think Ian Curtis's version of Sister Ray is possibly better than the Velvet Underground's, it doesn't mean I want to listen to it completely, yet this is precisely what it appears to want to do. Both when I start the playlist, and sometimes even when it's been happily mixing the playlist. Sometimes it just gets into a state where the next (shuffled) track is the same as the current track, forever. And before anyone says "hey, you just hit the repeat-per-track option", here's the fun bit: it switched from repeat playlist to repeat track, all on its own. That implies a state change, either in some local variable (how?) or that the app is persisting state and reloading it, and that persist/reload changed the value. As a developer, I suspect the latter, as it's easier to get a save/restore of an enum wrong.

The new UI doesn't help. Apparently using Siri helps, as you can just say "shuffle" and let it do the rest. I couldn't get that far. Because every time I asked it to play my music, it warns me that this will break the up next list. That's the one that's decided my entire playlist consists of one MP3, Sister Ray covered by Joy Division.




If one thing is clear:not only is the UI of iOS 8.4 music a retrograde step, it was shipped without enough testing, or with major known bugs. I don't know which is worse.

Siri (and Cortana, OK google and Alexa) are all showing how speech recognition has improved over time, and we are starting to see more AI-hard applications running in mobile devices (google translate on Android is another classic) —but it's moot if the applications that the speech recognitions systems are hooked up to are broken.

Which is poignant, isn't it:

• Cutting edge speech recognition software combining mobile devices & remote server-side processing: working
• Music player application of a kind which even Apple have been shipping for over a decade, and which AMP and Napster had nailed down earlier: broken.

The usual tactic: rebooting? All the playlists are gone, even after a couple of attempts at resyncing with itunes.

That's in then: I cannot use the Apple music app on the iPad to listen to my music. Which given that a key strategic justification for the 8.4 release is the Apple Music service, has to be a complete disaster.


This reminds me so much of the windows Vista experience: an upgrade that was a downgrade. I had vista on a laptop for a week before sticking linux on. I don't have that option here, only the promise that iOS 9 will make things "better"


I would go back to the ipod nano, except I can't find the cable for that, so have switched to google play and streaming my in-cloud music backup. Which, from an apple strategic perspective, can't rate very highly, not if I am the only person abandoning the music player for alternatives that actually work.