Spotify: Music & Podcasts

I don't know if I exactly like the TV/game console app (I also have the app on Xbox, and it seems there's no Google TV-particular issues or any of that). Lyric sync just never worked on TV, and you can't directly go to the artist of a song you're currently playing, so it definitely has some setbacks compared to Spotify's other apps. But I guess the main point is that everything you need to work, works, so I'll leave a 4-star

The biggest issue (and the reason for the 3 stars) is that artists and albums in the library aren't sorted alphabetically, which makes the library pretty useless. You'll likely just need to search any time you want to find something if you have more than 20 or so artists in your library. Also, this, like every other Android TV music app, is a dumbed-down version of the Android app, so don't get your hopes too high. That being said, this one is better than most of the rest (Tidal, Google Play Music, Youtube Music, etc). The "connect" feature is terrific, and something other services could learn from. Now if Spotify will only get on board with lossless audio. 2017 NVIDIA Shield TV

This app allows you to take your music and podcasts with you, but it's horrible at it. The user interface is far too busy, with functions that aren't useful for someone on the go. The buttons and icons don't have intuitive behaviors. Functions with no relationship are linked to a single click - e.g., if I download a podcast, it automatically adds it to some list called "Your Episodes". But I can't find where to view or manage Your Episodes. And paradoxically, when I delete a podcast from my device, the episode count on the Your Episodes list increments UP by one. It doesn't integrate well, or consistently, with the desktop or Chromecast apps. Sometimes I go from my apartment to my car and the mobile app picks up right where I left off on my desktop. Other times it automatically starts playing something altogether different, and not of my choosing. The app also tries to do too many things on its own. In the car, get home, hit pause, turn down the volume so it doesn't scare me next time, and the damn app starts playing again, because apparently turning the volume down means, "Start playing again." "Offline Mode" seems to play content that I know I haven't downloaded locally. How is it doing that? Whose data limits are being burned? The end user certainly doesn't know, because nothing is intuitive, labeled properly, or meaningful. I tolerate the app because I have the service. But it's a horrible, horrible app.