yea - in retrospect I think it's pretty clear about it from the text on the screens... but it surprised me too, because the initial UX is designed exactly like every other "upload your own music library so you can stream it anywhere" feature elsewhere. which is rather strangely blind to their own ecosystem, and tbh I don't see the purpose of a lightweight "upload your recordings from your phone!" feature, artists generally like a bit more control? afaict? or they just stream it somewhere without any metadata, neither of which seems viable with what Tidal's UI supports... but it's pushed in a prominent location for every listener on Tidal. surely there isn't anywhere near enough use to justify that... right?

I'm relatively happy with Tidal, but there are definitely a number of moments with it that make me sigh and internally say "see, this is why Spotify is winning". so much of it would be easy to change too, they just don't do it.

maybe they use Spotify themselves!

I've got Spotify as a native app in my 2024 ev and it's strange in that it starts songs like 1 second in, all the time. very unclear how that happens other than a software bug.