Apple Music app reportedly feels slow & buggy on iOS devices; some hopeful for iOS 17 to bring improvements

Here’s the crux of the article in video form:

Apple Music is currently the world’s second-biggest music streaming service after Spotify. However, despite Apple being its developer, the app has some major backend issues that significantly hurt its performance.

Some iOS users with Apple Music subscriptions are annoyed by how painfully slow the service can be at times. This makes it a less desirable option when compared to an arguably faster service like Spotify.

Apple Music app slow on iOS

According to multiple users (1,2,3,4,5), the Apple Music app is very slow and buggy on iOS devices. There are several issues with the app’s backend and frontend that make it feel sluggish even on the most powerful smartphones.

The key complaint is regarding its complex and slow backend. A user claims that when they open Apple Music, it makes around 40 DNS requests compared to the 10 DNS requests made by Spotify.

Apple Music makes like 40 dns requests when I open it to play a song. Spotify does about 10 requests. I guess the problem is an old iTunes infrastructure (which is older than Spotify) that Apple Music is still using.
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This makes it easier to understand why Apple Music also takes up significantly higher bandwidth. Some highlight that the infrastructure of Apple Music and Apple’s other iCloud-based services has always been disappointing.

Simple actions like pausing and resuming songs, switching playlists, downloading music, and more take much longer than other popular services in the market. The clunky and sluggish UI only makes things worse.

While the platform does have lossless audio quality, it’s hard to enjoy it if the app takes forever to navigate between songs. Some also claim that the Apple Music app on iOS is a buggy mess (1,2,3,4).

As an android user (Samsung Galaxy S10) I have found that Apple Music is much faster than spotify, especially when offline
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A few Android users say that Apple Music runs just as fast if not faster than Spotify on their device. This is surprising as well as a little ironic.

Some hopeful for iOS 17

According to some users, Apple is planning a lot of new updates and improvements for Apple Music with the upcoming iOS 17 release. However, there’s not much information about those changes yet.

We hope they work on both the backend as well as the visual aspect of the application. While users wait for the next software release, there is a potential workaround that can help make Apple Music a little faster.

It involves turning off ‘New Music Notifications’ and ‘Social features’ in the Accounts settings. This will help you reduce the number of background processes that the service runs.

We’ll keep an eye on this matter and update this story to reflect noteworthy developments in the future.

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