Apple Music Apple Music sucks in Tesla

[marty1980]

I don’t know who to blame: Apple or Tesla but the fact is that Apple Music is a 3rd-class citizen in Tesla vehicles.

I have a few primary issues and some UI complaints.

Issue 1) Grey’d out songs
I can see and play them on my phone, but in my car, random songs become unavailable and display in a grey’d out state.

Issue 2) Car forgets what I was last playing
Too often I have to restart a playlist or I lose the algorithm that I may have been happy with for discovery

Issue 3) Music refuses to play
I can browse the library and search for songs, but tapping the songs refuses to play

Issue 4) music refuses to play #2
Some songs in my playlists will be skipped over for no apparent reason. Trying to go back to them doesn’t work. They just refuse to play.

In general, I do not like the UI. One of the biggest issues is that you cannot create a playlist from the songs you listen to. So if I want to build a playlist, i will snap a photo for each song I discover and then do it on my phone later.

Spotify is getting a big update for Tesla. Spotify overall is a more consistent experience than Apple Music. It’s frustrating because I subscribe to Apple One so adding Spotify just to solve a software problem doesn’t make sense.

Neither Apple nor Tesla seem to care because it’s been months that I’ve had my car with various OTA updates and barely any improvements for the Apple Music experience. Considering music is the primary feature used by all drivers, it makes no sense to ignore this issue.

I’m not asking for the forum community to solve this. I know some work-arounds. I’ve reported to both companies. There needs to be more internet noise about these issues. Apple Music needs to at least function with the basics. Currently, it does not.

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

Given that Apple Music wasn’t even an option on Tesla’s until recently I’m putting this squarely on the shoulders of Tesla and their integration. This is why Android Auto and Apple Car Play exist, to have some standardization, but Tesla doesn’t offer this. Think of Tesla’s implementation as NON-native support which will always suck.

Hands-On With the Apple Music App for Tesla

Car manufacturer Tesla last week rolled out a holiday software update that added Apple Music support to Tesla vehicles, so we thought we'd check...

www.macrumors.com

 

[MacDaddyPanda]

So how is it connected now? Tesla app? Or just Bluetooth audio?

 

[marty1980]

So how is it connected now? Tesla app? Or just Bluetooth audio?

Tesla has their own native app. That is what I am referring to.

 

[rillrill]

Agreed. I moved to Spotify, which isn’t bad on my Tesla M3, partly because of this, but also, there is no decent podcast player on Tesla‘s either. Now that I am used to a music and podcast hybrid app, it’s hard to go back.

 

[person s]

I don’t know who to blame: Apple or Tesla but the fact is that Apple Music is a 3rd-class citizen in Tesla vehicles.

I have a few primary issues and some UI complaints.

Issue 1) Grey’d out songs
I can see and play them on my phone, but in my car, random songs become unavailable and display in a grey’d out state.

Issue 2) Car forgets what I was last playing
Too often I have to restart a playlist or I lose the algorithm that I may have been happy with for discovery

Issue 3) Music refuses to play
I can browse the library and search for songs, but tapping the songs refuses to play

Issue 4) music refuses to play #2
Some songs in my playlists will be skipped over for no apparent reason. Trying to go back to them doesn’t work. They just refuse to play.

In general, I do not like the UI. One of the biggest issues is that you cannot create a playlist from the songs you listen to. So if I want to build a playlist, i will snap a photo for each song I discover and then do it on my phone later.

Spotify is getting a big update for Tesla. Spotify overall is a more consistent experience than Apple Music. It’s frustrating because I subscribe to Apple One so adding Spotify just to solve a software problem doesn’t make sense.

Neither Apple nor Tesla seem to care because it’s been months that I’ve had my car with various OTA updates and barely any improvements for the Apple Music experience. Considering music is the primary feature used by all drivers, it makes no sense to ignore this issue.

I’m not asking for the forum community to solve this. I know some work-arounds. I’ve reported to both companies. There needs to be more internet noise about these issues. Apple Music needs to at least function with the basics. Currently, it does not.

it’s been great having Apple Music in my model 3 since late last year
I wanted Carplay but this has been good - accessing my entire music library plus everything else, great!
playlists from Mac and phone show up ok, not trying to do that from the car
after a recent software upgrade [2023.20.9] the music player has been misbehaving - songs not playing or jumping to the next one, not great

 

[marty1980]

At the beginning of the summer I signed up for 3 free months of Spotify Premium so that I could compare as well as have a fallback for when Apple Music was failing me in my car. Today was the end of that trial and I’ve cancelled my Spotify subscription. That means I’ll have to rely completely on Apple Music. However, even after all these months Apple Music is not much better than it was at the start. All of these issues persist. I got notice that there’s an update for my car today, but nothing in the release notes about Apple Music fixes. Disappointed is the nicest word I can come up with.

If Tesla pushes out the big Spotify update without fixing these Apple Music issues, my disappointment is going to start turning to something worse. Not that Telsa cares since they have no way of contacting them to complain. The service center can’t do anything about the infotainment software. All I’ll get is a poop emoji. What a joke.

No wonder people are such fans of Car Play and Android Auto. This is further proof that the car manufacturers won’t keep up and will ignore issues in their software. Apple and Google have much higher incentive to keep their software up-to-date and working as one would expect.

What a huge fail for Tesla.

 

[whsbuss]

What I have noticed is two fold at this time:

1. Searching for say a station on iHeart in the Apple Music app only search within the Tesla environment, like Tidal or Spotify or TuneIn.

2. For the Recently Played list, if you click to expand it, in fails with a Reload button and Loading Error in the bottom left side.

My guess is this is a failure of the Tesla app implementation. Sure hope this gets better over time.