Anyone who knows me has heard me talk about how I'm glad that we've got at least two choices for phone operating systems. Heck - I wish Blackberry and Windows Phone were still around. Not that I'd want to use either of those OS's myself, I just think choices and competition are good for everyone.
But although I don't own an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac, I've got to say that Apple has been driving me absolutely crazy recently. And it's not just that when I use my wife's phone for anything I feel like an 80-year old boomer parent trying to use technology. Seriously - I have trouble even unlocking an iPhone, because I swiped too far, or didn't swipe far enough, or swiped starting from the wrong point on the screen.
My first gripe is with Apple TV. Unlike every other streaming service I use, you don't have a single sign-on for the account, and then multiple profiles within it. Apple requires each user on the account to have their own Apple account, and then they're all grouped within the household. I don't know the specifics, because my wife set up the subscription. All I know is that once I started signing in with my own Apple ID rather than hers, I suddenly had my own watch list, and it seemed marginally normal.
Sure, it was still nearly impossible to navigate to the shows I'd saved to my watch list, and finding a list of seasons and episodes for any given show was literally not possible. But I could usually watch a thing. I have no trouble with the interfaces on HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Peacock, Paramount, or Roku. They're not fancy or slick, but they all work.
And then it stopped working. I'm still signing in with my Apple account, but now instead of allowing me to watch anything, it's asking me to enter a payment method. My wife tells me all is set up correctly on her end, but I'm still unable to get Apple TV to recognize that I'm paying them and I have an active subscription. And all this just as a new season of For All Mankind comes out.
Apple Music is nearly as bad. A couple years ago, my wife subscribed to Apple Music as part of some package. So we let our Spotify subscription go. I'd never been a huge Spotify fan, but it worked. Apple Music kind of doesn't.
The volume of most of the music I play is extremely low. I often have the volume maxxed out while listening in my car just to listen at what seems like a normal level. And then occasionally a song will begin at an actual normal volume level and nearly blow out my speakers. I've never had this issue with any other service. There's a setting to turn on and off some kind of volume normalization, and I've tried it both on and off, but it doesn't really work.
And then occasionally, a song just won't play. I'll tap the song name, and... nothing happens. Sometimes killing and restarting the app solves that problem, but if I'm driving, that isn't always an option. I suspect that maybe the team at Apple doesn't care a lot about their Android app. After all, if it doesn't work, they can just say that it's an Android issue and then maybe people will want to go buy an iPhone.
The way that Apple Music structures their playlists baffles me. I might be listening to some Steely Dan, then the next day some Guster and then some Radiohead. If I pull up the queue, I'll see a list of all the music I've listened to since the last time this list was cleared, and all those songs show up. I can understand wanting to keep a history, but the way it works is just janky. The currently-playing song doesn't appear in the list until it finishes, and you can see the previously-played songs and the up-next songs, with no indication of where in the playlist you are unless you remember what song recently ended. And if you click a previously-played song, it will play it and then the song that plays after it is... I don't know. Random. Maybe the next song in the list, maybe the one after the song that had been playing previous to your click, I'm not even sure. I only know that it never works the way I want or expect.
The absolute worst thing about Apple Music is the user interface. I don't know if they've tried to make it more like an iPhone and that's what's throwing me or what. But if I want to search for a song, I'll find that there's no search bar on the screen. Sometimes I need to swipe down in order to find the control I'm looking for, sometimes I'll need to hit the back button. Sometimes I'll want to pause a song and there's just no pause button anywhere. I really hate their UI.
...and I feel like an old man yelling at a cloud.