These are all different tabs in the same application, and yet, they don’t look or act the same.

Same app, different headers

If you look at them a bit more closely, you can see how the headings don’t align between tabs. This is even more evident when switching between tabs in the app. You might also notice that for the browse view, the hairline doesn’t go all the way to the right side of the screen, but rather stops beforehand for another to appear. These separators are scrolling with a carousel of images, yet in For You, where there is another carousel, they don’t scroll. Not to mention that the separators are completely different colours and are at different vertical positions as well.

Top: Library header when scrolled down — Bottom: For You header when scrolled down

My frustration with the headers doesn’t stop there though. In iOS 11, some of these headers collapse into a normal navigation bar title, while others just scroll with the content.

You could argue that so far, this has just been useless nitpicking, but when you’re willing to redesign an entire app’s design that lacks these flaws, you really do need to consider the fine details.

Left: Account page — Right: iOS Settings (First cell with personal information blanked out)

In iOS 11, they expanded this big header style to many other apps, and let developers do it in their own apps with ease. All of these apps keep the navigation bar background, yet here it lacks it. This, combined with the grouped white table view cells makes an odd appearance when viewed in full, especially when compared with the rest of the system.

Also, I’m actually nitpicking now, but this table view’s background is a different colour than the rest of iOS’s.

Navigation Bar Titles

As we just saw, some of the app’s headers collapse into a normal navigation bar title when scrolled. One of the flaws that’s been there since iOS 10 is the lack of navigation bar titles at all in some views. Navigation bar titles have been there since the first iPhone and serve as a way to remember where you are in a view, yet they are just absent in many different areas. Take any album, artist or playlist view and you’ll quickly find that once you scroll down, it’s hard to tell where in the app you are. Here’s two screenshots of an Apple Music playlist. As you can see, once you’ve scrolled down, there’s no telling where you are.

Are these even screenshots of the same playlist?

The pre-iOS 10 Apple Music app solved this by fading in the title as you scrolled, alike to the new iOS 11 behaviour of doing this for some of the bold headers, but it’s absent in many key places.

Translucency

The Music app’s MiniPlayer

Here we have the MiniPlayer for Music. As you can see, it’s fully translucent and blurry, while the tab bar below it is solid white. It almost seems intentional, but is a really odd and, to be blunt, ugly design choice.

Apple Music sharing profile views

If you look closely enough, the silhouette is there. (left)

If you don’t have a profile image, some places in Apple Music show your initials, while others opt for the silhouette of a man. There seems to be no actual reasoning behind this, other than a lack of attention to detail.

Profile page’s navigation bar next to literally every other navigation bar in the app.

Aside from the profile page, every other navigation bar in the app blends in with the content below it (same background colour, lack of hairline), as seen in the Library screenshot above. Why is the profile page any different?

Top to bottom: Profile page, artist page, playlist page

Also, why does the profile page get to have its action button in the navigation bar when it scrolls with the content for nearly every other page in the app? These buttons all perform nearly the same action for their respective content types, which is opening an action sheet with options to perform.

On-boarding

I don’t like Musique Francophone just because I’m Canadian, by the way.

The on-boarding Music selection view above looks like it hasn’t really been updated since iOS 9. The super-thin heading font (like really, why was it ever that thin?) is still there, and the line underneath it is a normal size, as opposed to the larger text sizes around the app.