“As far as I’m concerned, Apple cannot claim that it loves music ever again until it gives us the option to sort albums by date. No self-respecting music geek sorts albums by name. I don’t care if you hide the option in the Settings app, just give me the option for date, you wankers.”
Yes, that was me a few months back, railing on Apple for what was truly a terrible omission in the iOS Music app.
I honestly expected that Apple was never going to fix this, but low and behold, with the recent release of iOS 10.2, there’s the Sort button, sitting right in the artist listing top navigation bar, and it indeed lets us sort by Release Date, in ascending or descending order, to boot.
So let this be a beacon of hope for all your fantasy feature enhancements. I have no delusions that Apple reads my blog and “heard my plea” on this issue. I figure a like-minded brave developer or two on the iOS Music team pushed the powers that be until the feature was deemed worthy of the time.
To that developer or developers, I say thank you, from the bottom of my heart. It really does make a huge difference to the experience of playing music on my phone.
As far as Apple’s claims to loving music—let’s just say I’ll be at least slightly less likely to roll my eyes next time I hear that old line uttered on a stage by an Apple exec. They still have a long way to go, but the progress, however slow, is always welcome.
