Sathorn

Sathorn’s a thoroughly unremarkable player that earned scathing marks last year both for its uninspired functionality and “uncanny vally” design. While in broad strokes Sathorn’s UI is perfectly sufficient, it suffers from dozens of micro-failures to properly adhere to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, resulting in a product that’s substantially worse than the sum of its parts. I’m disappointed to say that at the end of this year there’s been no changes that I can detect from last year, leaving it just as poorly designed as its initial release.

In an effort to avoid copy/pasting my issues with the design from last year (which would be more effort than Sathron’s developer gave towards their own app this year), at a high level my primary issues with Sathorn are:

• Poor dark mode support. The “Dark” mode option is a blindingly bright gray, and the “True Black” mode misses just enough of Apple’s guidelines to feel uncomfortable and wrong compared to other apps. To top it off, Sathron doesn’t respect the system theme setting, forcing you to manually change it yourself in the app every time the system’s theme changes.
• Poor player design. Aside from a woefully boring “Solid” option, there’s three equally shoddy alternatives to choose from (“Light Blur”, “Deep Blur”, and “Dark Blur”). I’ve yet to find an album whose art looks good with any of them.

Where the design doesn’t disappoint, the app’s disjointed functionality does. At it’s core, it’s a general-purpose experience with the expected tab bar containing “Albums”, “Artists”, etc. However, Sathorn makes the fatal mistake of aping Music.app by attempting to integrate support for the Apple Music streaming service as well. Like Music.app before it, this results in a bloated and confused interface that does both local library browsing and Apple Music browsing poorly, and in Sathorn’s case worse than Music.app’s attempt. In my opinion, Sathorn would be much more pleasant to use had it gone for a precise and deliberate implementation of just the local-browser model like Picky or Cs did to great success.

Unfortunately, there’s not much else to say about Sathorn. There was barely any movement of note this year, and for an app that needed it as badly as Sathorn did, next year’s prospects look grim.

Widgets

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Personal Score Card

• Next App: “SongOwl”