YouTube Music users complain of bad offline mode usability due to broken search & sort functions

Google decommissioned its trusty Google Play Music streaming service late last year which led to the forced migration of millions over to its successor – YouTube Music.

The move was quite unsurprising considering Google had left Play Music in desperate need of a UI refresh for a couple of years before it was officially deprecated.

While YouTube Music sure was a breath of fresh air, former Google Play Music users have had to put up with a lot of bothersome issues which have spoiled the overall experience.

Of course, there were many who were simply annoyed because they had been forced to abandon a reliable service they had been using for years and were attached to it.

But there were and still are many others with legit reasons for hating YouTube Music. We have highlighted quite a few of these in the past including problems loading songs from local storage, the notorious “Song is unavailable” issue, and a missing native cast option.

And now, there are several users raging over how unusable YouTube Music becomes when using its Android or iOS app in offline mode. Or in other words, when not connected to the internet.

Complainants say that YouTube Music gives a miss to several crucial features that are essential in any music player when using it offline or on airplane mode.

These crucial functions include song search, sort by artists, option to view albums by an artist, and much more.

Not to mention a very a broken UI that keeps throwing “There is no network connection right now” error messages with almost every action.

Yeah Google, we know that we are disconnected. It might even be deliberate for all you know, so can you please stop pestering us about it? After all, one of the main reasons to download music is so that we can listen to it when offline.

Honestly, Google should learn a thing or two from Spotify.

The Spotify app on offline mode not only looks exactly like how it does online, but retains most of its functionality as well, with the exception of a broken search function.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any implication of improvements being made by Google to the YouTube Music app on offline mode now or in the near future, so users may simply have to get used to the kinks for now.

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