Apple Music Third Party Client for iPhone – MacStories

Soor, a third-party client for Apple Music created by independent developer Tanmay Sonawane, is based on a fascinating principle: unlike other standalone music players for iPhone, Soor works with Apple's native MusicKit API, allowing a direct integration with Apple Music. Unlike Apple's music app, Soor gives priority to one-handed gestures, user customization, and a single-page design that groups multiple sections into a single view. In theory, Soor should be the optimal mix of two different worlds: a third-party music player with its own aesthetic and stylistic choices, coupled with Apple Music data and the service's extensive streaming service catalog. In practice, although Soor has some concrete ideas that I would like to see in Apple Music also, and despite its intriguing visual design, the application can not be considered a complete replacement of the application Music on iPhone.

Two years ago, Apple launched MusicKit, a development framework and API set that allowed iOS developers to build Apple Music-compatible apps. Whether it be utilities such as Shazam or SongShift, standalone drives or clients with many features, MusicKit aimed to provide the native alternative to the Web API of Spotify that was missing in the ecosystem of iOS music apps. As I wrote in my article on iOS 11:

MusicKit allows applications to integrate with Apple Music and access artists, albums, songs, playlists, and even activities and curators. The MusicKit API returns JSON results and supports discovery operations such as search, graphics, and custom recommendations. To do this, iOS 11 has a new music authorization dialog with a string explaining why an app wants to access your Apple Music library and account.

I expect MusicKit to spark a creative and diverse ecosystem of music utilities – alternative clients that stream songs stored in your library (if Apple allows them on the App Store) to applications from formatting with further integration of Apple Music. It will be interesting to see if MusicKit becomes as popular as the Spotify API, at least on the iOS App Store.

Two years later, it is fair to say that the musical utilities have taken advantage of the native integration of MusicKit with Apple Music and the local music library of the user, but that the alternative clients are not the only ones to be used. get better on a platform where no Apple Music app is available, namely the open Web. In the last year alone, thanks to the introduction of MusicKit for the Web, several Web applications replicating the Apple Music experience in a browser have been launched – often with attention to detail and careful design which could even go unnoticed. an official Apple product. I guess this is a logical consequence: from the point of view of the user, it makes more sense to access Apple Music on a platform that does not have a dedicated embedded music application rather than installing another Apple Music player on an iPhone. , which already has a complete app preinstalled from Apple. But if so, what is Soor's place?

A customizable home screen

Soor's main selling point is its one-page design with sections that can be customized and rearranged by the user. Soor does not have a tab bar, which means that from a single home screen you will have access to:

• Your playlists
• Recently played
• Recently added
• Good titles from Apple Music
• Top playlists
• New versions
• Top songs
• Section For you from Apple Music

With the exception of For You (more details below), all these sections can be disabled in the application settings and rearranged so that, for example, your playlists and your albums recently read at the top of the screen, with the Apple Music sections. follow in the middle. The key proposal of Soor is this radical break with the organization of the Music application: instead of dividing Library and For You into two separate tabs, Soor allows you to mix and match both types of content in the same screen, which allows you to choose the display order. are displayed for faster access.

In the few weeks that I have spent testing Soor on my iPhone, this has proven to be my favorite aspect of the application. In an earlier issue of our MacStories Weekly newsletter (# 154), Ryan pleaded for a customizable page for you in the Music app, stating how Apple should consider letting the Users customize the order of blocks displayed in what is, for the most part, the default view of Apple Music. Soor follows up on this idea with the ability to decide which sections you want to see and where to place them. In daily use, the end result is a music application faster to use than Apple Music, because the playlists, albums and songs that interest you are just two fingers away. Everyone's musical preferences are different. Soor's flexible and modular approach is exactly what I would like to see in the future of Apple Music.

It should also be noted that Soor's design fits the modern iOS ecosystem while balancing the density of information better than Apple's own application. Compare the Music presentation of the For You page and your playlists on the same screens as those viewed in Soor:

With smaller thumbnails and scrollable grids, Soor is able to display more on-screen content, increasing the speed and convenience of cross-section navigation. On the other hand, where Apple Music once felt bold and intuitive, it now appears too sparse and limited. Again, I would like that a future version of Apple Music lets me choose the aggregated content density in the For You page, much like iOS allows me to choose the font size for the entire system with a simple slider.

MusicKit and for you

As for music, even though Soor has his own Now Playing screen, he uses the Apple Music engine and audio player. This means that when a song is played in Soor, it will also appear in the Music application because Soor is simply a different front end for the same underlying service. Playback of a song in Soor will be reflected in Control Center and in the Apple Watch as if it were being played in Music; Similarly, if you start playing something in Soor, then force him to leave the app, she will continue to play because, behind the scenes, playback is handled by the Music app.

There is a notable omission (the first of a long list): unlike the Music app, Soor does not support AirPlay 2; you will not be able to stream to multiple AirPlay 2 speakers at once, or control what is played separately. channel of the audio system of your iPhone. According to Sonawane, AirPlay 2 is one of the features that it plans for future application updates, but – given the price of the application – it would have been nice to have it available at launch.

The inclusion of the For You section is one of the benefits of MusicKit. It achieves a basic level of feature parity with the Music app. In Soor, the For You section consists of a series of content blocks that are always displayed at the bottom of the Home screen and can not be rearranged or divided into smaller, individual blocks. These blocks are:

• Selected Playlists (Favorites Mix, Chill Mix, New Music Mix)
• Playlists and albums of the day
• Spotlight on artists
• New for you

These are the same sections that you would see in the Music app, but they are available directly in Soor. Like For You content, you can also access content from the Sonos app after you have logged in an Apple Music account. The Friends Mix and Heavy Rotation playlists, exclusive to the Music application, are particularly absent. I am aware of the fact that the MusicKit API does not have the Friends mix / stream (so Soor can not do anything about it), but I'm wondering why For You can not be freely reordered on the screen or why. can not be reduced to a subset of playlists or sections.

Other features of the design

Soor has its share of problems, as I will detail in the section below, but I must mention its many visual pleasures and other design elements that deserve to be discussed.

In addition to a standard bright theme, Soor supports a true black theme (ideal for OLED displays) and a dark mode based on dark grays and oranges; I like it a lot and hope that Apple has a similar palette in mind for Apple Music under iOS 13.

While the Apple Music app uses a combination of 3D Touch and buttons to display context menus for songs, playlists and other items, Soor totally avoids 3D Touch and uses a combination of contextual menus and Drag and drop to allow users to perform actions and manage their queue. . You can call shortcut menus by pressing an ellipsis button next to songs / albums or the artist name in the Now Playing screen. I like the way these menus are not modal on the iPhone – they do not cover the entire screen – but rather like context menus inspired by macOS. Despite their resemblance to the desktop menus, they feel like on iOS: each menu item has its own icon and you can "hover" with your finger on each option to feel a subtle haptic support and see a highlight around the menu. 39, selected item. As others have shown recently, I begin to think that desktop type context menus can indeed be adapted to iOS.

Soor differs from Apple Music in the way it implements queue management. Soor's context menus do not contain buttons for "play next door" or "add to queue"; instead, this is done entirely by dragging the songs and placing them in a "drop zone" which has buttons for queuing, add songs to playlists, like them, and share them with extensions.

This interaction is really Well done, and it's now one of the best windows to drag and drop for iPhone with Castro. ^{When you drag a song and hover over the drop zone buttons, each glyph is highlighted, reads a haptic stroke, and displays a tooltip to indicate that it is active if you let go of the song. Management of the playlist is even more impressive in that if you pause a song above the play list button, the drop zone will expand and reveal an extra set of playlists that you can scroll while dragging to select a playlist.}

As I mentioned above, the adoption of drag and drop by Soor is impressive, both visually and technically. After a few weeks of using the app, however, I'm not convinced that it's necessarily faster than the more simple but effective 3D Touch menu from Music. I use 3D Touch a lot in Apple Music to like songs, access albums or add songs to my queue. The gesture is "sloppy" in that it does not require pressing a small button with too much precision, and I got used to pressing with my thumb, selecting a menu option without lifting the finger, then releasing it. Using Soor, I missed the 3D Touch interaction of Music and felt that the application menus and the drag-and-drop system were slower than Music's press-to-open system.

I'd also like to point out Soor's "pull to reach" feature, a setting designed to make one-hand operations easier by allowing you to display the screen to select the buttons on the bar. tools at the top. Think of it as if you were shooting to refresh, only it must be more "intentional" and you have to wait for a toolbar icon to be selected (it will be highlighted and you will feel a support) before to be able to release and release the button. In Soor, it is presented as an easier way to open parameters, to activate the search function or to adjust sorting in playlists, because these three buttons are placed at the top of the screen and can be difficult to achieve.

I like the feeling behind pull, which is presented as one of the major characteristics of Soor, but in my experience, the fortuitous triggers of the lowering gesture were too common to justify leaving the setting enabled. Even with an option to mitigate the attraction to be achieved with a 0.5 second delay enabled, I found that I could often trigger the search when I was simply scrolling through the application without wanting to open the research and engage it to achieve it. There is definitely Something the idea of ​​achieving, but the current implementation was too unreliable for me to leave it on.

Problems and limitations of Soor & # 39; s

I'll get right to the point: whether it 's by limitations of MusicKit or by the personal decisions of its developer, Soor is affected by a variety of other issues that prevent him from being an Apple client Complete music capable of replacing the Music application.

Soor lacks key features that are part of the modern Apple Music experience. Apart from For You and the best songs, most other views of Apple Music are missing: the artists' pages lack profile images, they do not separate the different types of musical outputs and do not show you no longer the bios of the artist and the associated artists; there are no music videos either. It is impossible to search for new music in Soor: Apple Music has a cover page that highlights interviews, news and videos; you can browse the genres, consult the radio stations and see the list of new features to appear on the main Browse page; all this is absent from Soor.

It gets worse, though. Soor does not support Beats 1 at all, does not have built-in lyrics, does not work with AirPlay 2, and is limited by limitations of the API which, for example, prevent it from sharing playlist links , to see what your friends have listened to, or to understand which tracks from an unreleased album are actually available for streaming or not (if you try to play them, they will not do anything because they are not yet available) . The developer is candid about some of these technical limitations in an integrated FAQ section of the application, but it is unclear whether all the other missing features were also due to API restrictions or if they were taken during development.

What is certain is that Soor is an iPhone application for $ 10 (it does not support the iPad in this first version). It's touted as having "full Apple Music support," while in reality Music player which integrates with Apple Music but lacks dozens of features that make up the modern Apple Music experience. It's a subtle difference, but it's here that I trace the dividing line between the Apple Music App and Soor.

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All this raises the question: why should you buy Soor?

It is undeniable that the app has an attractive user interface and is perhaps the best example of MusicKit support in a third-party Apple Music Client for iOS. But I do not think that the beautiful design and strong API adoption are sufficient reasons to recommend a $ 10 app to our customers. Instead, I think you should consider Soor if you are the kind of Apple Music subscriber who does not care about all the other features missing from the app (videos, Beats 1, search for new music, artist pages, etc.) and wants to get quick access to playlists in a single page design. The ability to customize the order of sections and place playlists at the top is the feature that distinguishes Soor from the Music app. If you're the type to pay for Apple Music to broadcast songs without worrying about other modern features of Apple Music and just want to quickly listen to playlists on an iPhone, I'd say that Soor is probably for. you. Unfortunately, I have the impression that this is not a huge market, but I could be wrong.

In many ways, Soor reminds me of Listen, the music player for iOS that was launched well before Apple Music and its streaming services. Like Listening, Soor brings to the music player a different design sensibility, but it can not be considered a complete replacement of the main service to which it is integrated due to numerous technical restrictions and choices made. For this reason, Soor is finally stuck between his vision and the realities of Apple Music: the application promises you a complete and beautiful listening experience, but it can not yet realize that vision. I hope that its developer will be able to iterate on this first version of the application by providing a version for iPad and by supporting all Apple Music features that can be added to the application. But if you are a big user of Apple Music, Soor 's approach, despite its beauty and intelligence, is too limited to replace the Apple Music app today. .

Soor is available on the App Store at $ 9.99.