Hey Plex team,
I’ve been a long time Plex user and Plex Pass owner. I love the server product, and was really excited when I learned about Plexamp. I have been trying it out recently and I think the mobile version is amazing. It really works great and while there are always more features to add, the core functionality is IMO flawless. But I also gave the desktop version a try, and I came away really disappointed. I hope that this serves to provide some constructive criticism that you guys can use to make the desktop app as great as the mobile one is.
The biggest problem by far is the UI. It just feels nothing like a desktop app, which makes sense because from a user point of view, it’s literally the mobile UI running inside a borderless window. I assume there’s more going on under the hood, but that is really a problem for a desktop app. Desktop and mobile have different UI needs (as MS had to learn with Win8 back in the day), and you can’t just transpose one UI into the other form factor without alienating those users. Here’s what I see when I launch the app on my desktop:
No title bar with min/max/close buttons, no menu bar, not even borders to help define the window a bit more clearly from the rest of my screen. If I want to close the app there’s no obvious way to do so - I need to right-click my Windows taskbar and pick “close” from the menu. There’s no way at all to minimize the window. On Windows at least, it’s a pretty common use case to start playing music and minimize the window to the taskbar (or better still, the notification area!). But I don’t see a way to do that here.
I also think that the UI could stand to take advantage of desktop real estate more. The home page is fine as it is (though I’m not a real fan of having buttons at the bottom as my controls - again that is fine for mobile but feels awkward on desktop). But when you’re playing music, the UI really should take advantage of the fact that there’s a huge screen available. This is what it looks like now:
All of this is pretty much fine for music playing, so no real issues with the functionality. But it’s really not great to have to click the little down chevron in order to get back to the home page and go to my other music. This is a desktop app, it should take advantage of the real estate! Have my library show in another pane, have obvious tabs on the left side for different areas of the UI, something instead of the way it is now. To be honest the chevron isn’t super intuitive even in a mobile context, but on the desktop it just doesn’t fit the paradigm at all.
I also really would urge you to consider not using Electron for this app. I understand the reasons why you do, but especially given the stated desire to follow in the footsteps of Winamp I really think that this app shouldn’t carry the baggage of Electron. Frankly, Electron is great for devs but sucks for end users (and the goal is to give the end user a better product, right?) due to the unnecessary resource consumption and typical lack of cohesion with native apps. However, even if you do decide to stick with Electron for ease of development reasons (which I get), I would urge you to look at some best-in-class Electron apps and see how they do it. Look at something like VS Code. They’re using Electron, but they’ve really put in the work to make it look and feel like a native desktop app. If Plexamp does continue to use Electron, that is the sort of experience I’d like to get there: the UI design should be so good that I would never even guess that it’s Electron unless I start researching the tech details.
Finally, I have a couple of other points of feedback:
- On Windows 10, Plexamp keeps pinging notifications about what song it has in queue. I had to silence it because it got pretty annoying.
- I really would like to see the app have its own volume slider in the “playing” UI. While it’s pretty normal for a music player on mobile to not have an internal volume control, on desktop this is a pretty expected feature. It’s not a dealbreaker if it doesn’t exist, but this would be a great feature to add in the future.
Thanks for your work guys. I hope that this feedback helps to make the product even better and help you make Plexamp the best music player for both mobile and desktop platforms!
