i spent this weekend deep in focus mode trying to get some personal projects done - the type of work that had my eyes glued to the screen this entire weekend. now if you know me, you know that if i play music when i do deep work, i need the tracks to have consistent bpm and flow nicely. and since i was feeling deep house/ minimal techno, i opened my loopy playlist on spotify to see if i can tweak the transitions between tracks. make it flow better. spotify has this mix feature where you can see tempo and adjust transitions - cool, exactly what i need.

except... it's mobile-only.

okay fine. switched to my phone, started messing with the mix settings, got it working. then i wanted to reorganize my playlist folders because they were a mess. guess what? folder management is desktop-only.

so now i'm switching between devices like some kind of digital ping-pong ball. phone for mixing. desktop for folders. phone for one feature. desktop for another. and i'm sitting here like – why? why are we doing this?

and it hit me: this is what happens when "mobile-first" becomes "mobile-only" for certain features. it's not that mobile-first design is bad - it makes sense, most people are on their phones. but when you start splitting core functionality across platforms, you're not designing for flexibility. you're designing fragmentation.

the thing is, i get why companies do this. mobile is where the users are. mobile is where the engagement happens. mobile gets prioritized in the roadmap. but somewhere along the way, we forgot that people don't live in just one context. sometimes i'm on my laptop in deep work mode. sometimes i'm on my phone during commute. and i shouldn't have to choose which version of the product i get based on which device i happen to be holding.

what frustrates me most is that spotify clearly has the capability to build these features - they just chose to split them across platforms. these features could exist on both platforms. but instead, we get half an experience on desktop and half on mobile, and we're expected to just... deal with it?

it's like building a house where the kitchen is in one building and the dining room is in another. sure, both rooms are great individually, but good luck having dinner.

maybe i'm being dramatic. maybe i'm just annoyed because i had to interrupt my flow state to switch devices five times. but also - isn't that the point? good design shouldn't make you think about the tool. it should just work, wherever you are, however you're working.

anyway. back to reorganizing playlists on desktop. and then switching to mobile to actually use the mix feature. and then back to desktop. and then-

you get it.