TuneIn Radio: adding features until it breaks

There was a nifty mobile app that let me find and play radio stations from around the world. Some of the stations are terrestrial stations that stream their broadcasts on the Internet, while others are Internet-only. The app was called TuneIn. The developers released a new version this week and they broke it.
Let me say at the outset that I had no quarrel with TuneIn radio. I've been a paying customer for a couple of years, used it on my Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and desktop systems. I have a bunch of stations saved as favorites, mostly world news, but some music, and one very special Goon Show channel. The developers have fixed bugs in the time that I've used the app, smoothing out the playback, and making it of the apps that I use several times a day. It might have been nice to allow me the option to reorder my list of favorites, such that I could have my favorite favorites on the top, but that was a minor issue.
Here's what they did. They redesigned it, as Nicole Lee from Engadget wrote, to be a social network for radio. I can now follow other TuneIn users to find out what they listen to. Through some kind of social magic, I can supposedly find music that is more to my liking, find new stations that are something like the stations I've been listening to, only better somehow.
In the words of the Tom Hanks character in Big, I don't get it. I liked what the app did. The developers thought that I had a problem finding things that I liked. I didn't.
Along the way, they made it harder for me to do what I used to do: listen to radio stations. Here's how they broke it.
Here's a partial view of my favorite stations.

If I tap on Goon Show Radio, I'm brought to s second screen.

Now, I have to tap the Play button to have the station start. Previously, I'd been brought to the player and the station would start playing.

When I tap Play, I'm brought to the player screen. I'm not sure where to go from here. Tapping the checkmark removes this station from my list of favorites. Why that should be prominently featured as an option, I have no idea. Non-intuitively, tapping the X closes this screen and brings me back to the station page.

In other words, an extra step has been added each time I want to when I use the app, to listen to a radio station. 

There's a whole bunch of other stuff, including solicitations to connect to my Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts. I've done none of that. I didn't have a problem for which connections to my social media accounts is a solution. 

Zawinski's Law told us in the 90s that every program expands until it can read mail. The twenty-teen version of the law says that every app must become social and die trying.

Addendum

I installed the new TuneIn on my iPad to see what a fresh installation looks like when compared to the upgrade. I forgot my password and so clicked on the Forgot Password link. That was five hours ago. If I try again, I'm told that a reset request is already underway.

Undocumented radio in Worcester

Just recently, a strong FM station showed up on 103.5. The airchecks are heavily reverbed, so I couldn't make out the station's call sign. I suspect it may be New Vision Radio (with a Facebook page). They are offering to stream their shows online (Windows Media Player) or via phone.

As with others in the city (105.5, 106.5, and, occasionally, 102.9), these stations don't show up in the FCC's tables. (For ease of use, here's a link to Radio Locator. The FCC tables are sometimes slow and tricky to navigate.) The new station is strong and clear just beyond the city's periphery, which is good, because WODS, at 103.3, is a popular oldies station; interference would attract too much attention.

Listening to my country

I switched over to the AM band and picked up the Red Sox game just as I was passing Fenway on the Pike on my way home from Boston. I listened to the play-by-play for a while, hearing about Victor Martinez's long out to center field and J.D Drew's double to put the Sox ahead. When the inning ended, I hit the search button on the radio, revisiting a world from long ago.
In junior high school, our science teacher mocked our radio habits. "FM is fine music," she said. "AM is average music." AM radio was our world. FM was classical and other stuff that was of no interest.
Even more important than the music was the world beyond that came through on an AM radio after dark. The forecasts of lake-effect snow for Cheektowaga, New York were more real to us in central Massachusetts because WKBW from Buffalo was a clear channel station while WMEX, from Boston, dropped its power at sundown. (More about this at the FCC web site: Why AM Radio Stations Must Reduce Power, Change Operations, or Cease Operations at Night).
Because I was driving, I didn't try to record call letters or frequencies. I'd listen for a while and move up the dial until the tuner circled back to the beginning. I listened to

• Red Sox, Yankees, and Mets games in English and Spanish
• bloviating gasbags such as Michael Savage who had a sore throat and wondered if the Communists had put some Gulf shrimp into his Chinese take-out
• preachers who sounded too much like Reverend Lovejoy
• nationally syndicated broadcasts of various loonies, such as a guy who rattles off a lengthy list of eye-of-newt type of herbal formularies to treat a woman's husband who has a long list of ailments that she's determined to cure for him.
• very little music
• identifiable local content only from the all-news stations from New York and Montreal and from Dan Rea on WBZ with a particularly evasive Charlie Baker.

By the time I arrived home, it was well after dark and the station lineup had changed from near to far. Even with all of the consolidation of media outlets and homogenization of formats, AM radio mixes it up pretty well. You won't fun tunes to rock your world, but you will get a dose of what Steinbeck said of Cannery Row:

Cannery Row - Google Books

An American tune

Downstairs in the Goodnow-Pearson building in Gardner, you take a 45 rpm record a listening booth and, for the two minutes and and change, be transported into the world of rock-and-roll.
The listening booth at Goodnow's wasn't the first place I'd heard Hound Dog. Maybe it was the radio in the Studebaker pickup. I didn't have a radio in my room yet. My parents kept the clock radio tuned to WBZ/WBZA, which had a regular lineup of disc jockeys and played a lot of rock and roll.
Most likely, though, I heard Hound Dog at the homes of one of the older kids in the neighborhood, the ones who had their own record players and stacks of 45s from Elvis, Little Richard, Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, and more.
Hound Dog was the first Elvis song that I knew. The longer and more complex story of how important he was or wasn't is best left for another day.
Just think about a little and very white kid in an enclave of first and second generation immigrants listening to a white kid from the south cover a song of anger and betrayal written by a couple of Jews and first heard when sung by black woman and you'll be thinking about America.