Apple Music only has significant usage because of their anti competitive behavior.
All apps on the App Store have to go through rigorous review and are restricted to Apples discretion in being granted access to OS features while Apple themselves use undocumented features to compete as a platform.
Try hooking up AirPods to your iPhone and do nothing else. The Lock Screen changes to have an Apple Music player with a random song you may have never listened to.
This, even if you were listening to another song on YouTube Music or any other music app as your last played audio.
On more than one occasion, I’ve accidentally played some idiotic pop song that Apple Music pushes into this experience while commuting with AirPods and noise cancellation on while holding the phone firmly grasped in my hand.
It’s ridiculous how many of these little UX tricks they adopt that boost the metrics of their internal products while openly denying the competition access to the same.
Try hooking up AirPods to your iPhone and do nothing else. The Lock Screen changes to have an Apple Music player with a random song you may have never listened to.
Just tried it and had a different experience. The lock screen showed the last thing I was listening to last night: The SiriusXM app.
It's funny because this sometimes catches me by surprise. I'll go to sleep listening to Sirius. Then I'll get into the car 18 hours later, and when the phone auto-connects to the car radio, it suddenly starts playing 40's Junction when I'm merging into traffic.
Happens all the time, but I'm still surprised every time it does.
The is actually kind of annoying behavior. My work's phone system emails me voicemails as a sime email with a wav file attached (why wav? arent we 30 years past that for spoken text?). When I tap the wav file to listen to it, fine, but then I get in my car and it fires up and plays that voicemail.
I just tried this and my lock screen shows me 4 thumbnails that I know are my most played songs/playlists but the main app and play button are the video that I most recently watched (and paused) in firefox. I know when I listen to postcasts using Overcast (since I like their UI better than Apple's), it shows up in the lock screen. This is reliable for me. It also becomes the default thing to play if I hook up to my CarPlay. So I don't think these are necessarily anti-competitive practices—it may just be you are hitting a weird bug or edge case.
A "Weird bug or edge case" is rarely the case with these upsells. There's a lot of marketing and research budget that goes into designing these flows and equally tonnes of data behind observing the behavior.
That precisely is my point. The behavior on my end is strange as well where it happens at times i'm commuting and other times, when the phone is still, nothing. Where can i go and switch this off in settings for Apple Music short of killing the app and uninstalling?
Isn't it strange that all app behavior and interaction with the OS for apps that aren't owned by Apple need to be predictable and controlled through standard settings while Apple Music has hidden access to over ride these behaviors?
I can write paragraphs about similar behavior on the News app and other upsell services. When a platform can directly push apps without competition to your device that they don't need to compete with anyone for installs for, that is one thing, having access to undocumented APIs is another, having the ability to plow all revenue from their apps right back in without the 30% cut or other restrictive practices they impose on their direct competitors is yet another.
Either there should be transparency or there should be restrictions on the way internal Apple apps are allowed to compete in the marketplace. A random product manager at Cupertino should not have more power and clout over what apps get pushed to my phone without consent or dialogs and upsells get thrown in the UX compared to what is possible for public apps to do.
Oh come on. You're describing a behavior that makes no sense—of course it's a bug. The whole point of that widget on the lock screen is to show you the last thing you paused so that you can continue listening to it. It's not there to push random ads.
That is not the official line. The whole point of that widget on the lock screen is to perform behavior that is not codified in OS settings or available directly to __ANY__ external developer outside of Apple.
When a "Bug" seems to oddly fit in favor of a native OS's paid feature uptake, call me skeptical when i don't think it is a "Mistake", i mean what are the odds that Apple Music launches, the team is under pressure to deliver subscriber numbers and suddenly this behavior shows up?
The whole approach to Software companies where ridiculous behavior like this are tolerated in recommendation engines in feed or in OS level features that are anti competitive by nature and dismissed as a "Transient bug" by people who should know better is not right.
All apps on the App Store have to go through rigorous review and are restricted to Apples discretion in being granted access to OS features while Apple themselves use undocumented features to compete as a platform.
Try hooking up AirPods to your iPhone and do nothing else. The Lock Screen changes to have an Apple Music player with a random song you may have never listened to.
This, even if you were listening to another song on YouTube Music or any other music app as your last played audio.
On more than one occasion, I’ve accidentally played some idiotic pop song that Apple Music pushes into this experience while commuting with AirPods and noise cancellation on while holding the phone firmly grasped in my hand.
It’s ridiculous how many of these little UX tricks they adopt that boost the metrics of their internal products while openly denying the competition access to the same.