Good dialog on an important subject. The phone is the remote control of life and it is a MUST for any successful end-user app to have a solid phone interface. Yes, I use a tablet and computer, but I also often grab the phone to advance, change, find something,etc. I also experience many of the same issues cited by the OP with Roon on my iPhone. It does not behave as I would expect and it regularly crashes.
I have lifetime Roon subscription that I’ve had for many years and have already gotten my money’s worth. It has generally been a good product.
I hope… expect that the developers will improve this over time.
I’ll take this opportunity to also say that I believe most of us would like one app to manage music, home or away. How about an off-core and/or offline capability linked to my Tidal subscription?
This is what I am wondering about. Roon is working on full Mobile, if they launch that then they open the app to a whole new customer base. Regular people could actually check out Roon.
I would say if they switched this on tomorrow, as is, they would be shredded. People outside of the enthusiast space have an exceptionally low tolerance for bugs and workarounds.
I have to assume that Roon is moving to native apps and looking at their phone app critically because if not, it will hinder their success.
We, in the community, have no idea what this means. And, without having any idea what this means from a Roon product perspective…
This may not change in the short term. Roon is a lot more complicated to stand-up than, say, PlexAMP. If Roon mobile is nothing more than a single mobile endpoint (your phone) with no other changes then I don’t see this opening up Roon to “regular people” yet. It just opens up mobile for the existing target market. You’d still need all the normal “Roon stuff” to make it work. But, reworking the phone UI is welcomed and probably required for success either way. It’s just less of a priority depending on exactly what Roon ends up defining as “mobile”.
I just assumed based on comments on the Roon mobile thread that Roon was moving towards streaming being the future and mobile being a big part of that.
Danny was poking around ideas of cloud backup / hosting solutions, probing how much people would pay.
I assumed that a full cloud Roon was on the cards.
No doubt you are right though, it could be a much smaller step that just enables streaming from our core outside of the home rather than a 2.0 revamp.
@Okke_Tijhuis This is such an awesome, thoughtful post. I shared it with the team in our Slack workspace and we’re already having a good discussion about some of the points you raised.
Some of these are quick wins that could be easily knocked off the list, some are massive projects, and others are working as-designed. Regardless, thank you for taking the time to write this up and share. Some other members of the team may drop by here or reach out to you directly with more questions.
That’s great to hear! And of course I’m available to answer any questions. I know all too well how hard it is to fix something when all you get is it doesn’t work without any context or reasoning. And some of the issues, like the ones about what Roon radio is playing, are very much a personal preference and you can’t please everyone.
What would be very helpful though is not only knowing which features are working as-designed, but also the reasoning why they were designed that way. It helps to give the users a better perspective and maybe it leads to solutions that multiple user groups benefit from.
When it comes to one-handed use, today I was using the Tidal app for a while and imho it’s about as good as it gets. So I figured I might as well add it as an example.
All the functionality you might use while listening to music (including shuffle/repeat) is reachable with your thumb. Even the different tabs. The heart/like button is comparable to Add to library in Roon. It’s also available in the menu. The button for switching outputs is at the top, which makes sense. It’s important functionality but usually it’s set it and forget it. The quality (I’d compare that to the Roon signal path) is also at the top. Useful information but no need to interact with it often. Swiping left/right/down on the album cover also works, which means you don’t have to search for the buttons all the time.
Even though there are a lot of buttons on this screen, it never feels too crowded and they are easy to press, even on a small iphone.
The only thing I miss, which actually works great in Roon, is being able to tap a certain point on the track timeline to jump to a specific spot. You have to drag the handle in Tidal. They probably want to avoid accidentally skipping parts of the song.
Here the tabs are at the top, even though there’s a lot of unused space at the bottom. The buttons are about half the size of those in Tidal, which makes them harder to press. I always have to go to the menu to add a track to the library, which is something I do often. I’m also missing the shuffle/repeat buttons. Not only are those in the Queue tab at the top, but what do you normally do after you set shuffle/repeat? You go back to Now playing. But now you can’t tell anymore if shuffle or repeat are actually active. There’s no visual feedback. Having the buttons on the main screen also provides instant feedback about what is active. Not saying they should be removed from the Queue tab, I see the use case for that as well.
Fantastic post with relevant story based use cases. One has to think that the application was built and tested against some requirements/use cases. There’s should be a list of functional requirements and use cases made public. Presume you are also a fan of Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman regarding the user experience. Also, it would be useful for Roon engineers to watch how users actually navigate screens in context of what they are trying to accomplish. It is better to watch the user vice listen to the user…could Roon accomplish such a testing experience with a group of actual first line users? Also employ greater use of rapid iterative prototyping. Lastly I highly recommend hiring applied psychologists/ human systems interface engineers!
I use Tidal outdoors and their playlists and mixes are way better than Qobuz for my taste in music. So I do a lot of my music discovery through Tidal. Spotify is even better for discovery but since that’s no option Tidal will have to do. I definitely prefer the Qobuz sound quality when actually listening to the music though. The Tidal MQA thing is annoying but luckily they added the hifi subscription without MQA support.
Yes, the crashes are much more frequent than the hangs though. Crashes are basically a daily occurrence.
I had a weird issue right after I turned on the keep screen awake option. Roon crashed and suddenly my phone screen turned black and I couldn’t do anything with it anymore. Luckily resolved itself after 5 minutes or so. Not sure if the black screen had anything to do with Roon but I turned the feature off again right away.
I managed to remove crashing by paying attention to endpoint connection.
Moving all endpoints off wifi made a big improvement.
With soo much deviation in networks, servers, pc quality I don’t know how Roon can possibly please everyone with 100% trouble free operation. Rock should be a baseline standard for all systems, IMO.
Wifi is also problematic.
Good network design is key.
But this does not exclude any programming issues with the app.
Some other members of the team may drop by here or reach out to you directly with more questions.
