8 ms·

Building Spotify’s New Web Player

101 points by jbredeche 8y ago

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
Link to new player: https://open.spotify.com https://open.spotify.com (built with React)
- altmind 8y ago
  I've been using this player for at least 9 months. This new player misses a lot of features that old web.spotify.com used to have. For example, you used to be able to sort songs by popularity in search results. Or you used to be able to start playing artist songs from all the albums. Now when you "play an artist", all you get is 5 tracks, and to listen for the rest you have to listen by-album.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- 941dq9 8y ago
  How is that new? Unless I'm in the wrong A/B group, I'd say I've been using the same player for a long time.
mlex 8y ago
The article seems kind of light; all of the stuff I expected to read was summarized in the "The Tech Architecture" section, then the article suddenly ended. It felt like they spent three sections on background information and only one on details about the new player.
- 9935c101ab17a66 8y ago
  Yah I agree. There's almost nothing of interest in this article, which is a shame because I think it would be really interesting to hear more about the challenges, process and final product.
dirtylowprofile 8y ago
Their iOS is still slow. I am on a Fiber connection and everytime I open Spotify it displays “no connection”.
- president 8y ago
  I see this everyday as well. You would think they would have addressed this by now given how glaring the error message is.
  - cruise9 8y ago
    I don’t know if it’s incompetence or ignorance but Spotify has some of the worst apps going around. Remember the bad old days when the UI didn’t even support rotation on phones?
    - bscphil 8y ago
      It's funny - I haven't tried Spotify in years so I have no idea if it's still bad - simply because Spotify burned their goodwill with me as a customer because of how bad their Android app was in the first year or so of their US launch.
- confounded 8y ago
  Anyone have any idea what causes this? Establishing a more complicated type of connection type for streaming (excuse my networking ignorance), or something DRM related?
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  FWIW I used to have this issue until I opted into the iOS Testflight beta. It's been over a year and I haven't had it since. [1] https://testflight.apple.com/join/7lt2tesn https://testflight.apple.com/join/7lt2tesn
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
AaronMT 8y ago
What is not supported In Safari?
- dddddaviddddd 8y ago
  Based on a quick test of the web player in Safari with the user agent set to Chrome, something with promises is broken in Safari (relative to Chrome, that is).
  - munk-a 8y ago
    Safari is terrible and I applaud all applications that are broken on it, when Apple breaks down and actually offers a cross-platform version of their browser for testing then my various things might start working on it... Until then, if you have an iPhone, download chrome.
    - deskamess 8y ago
      I thought there was an HN post recently about how browsers on the iPhone need to use WebKit. They were not allowed to be better (from a rendering perspective). Or perhaps I misunderstood that.
      - sciurus 8y ago
        You're right. Chrome and Firefox on iOS are WebKit-based.
    - 9935c101ab17a66 8y ago
      1) I think you can build webkit on Windows? Either way, webkit is available on multiple platforms. 2) It goes both ways, Microsoft only recently announced that new versions of Edge are coming to macOS in the future, and only because they are moving to Blink/Chromium. 3) Chrome on iOS uses webkit, soooooooo What actual complaints do you have about safari? I definitely don't think it's perfect, but Chrome has it's own weird issues and inconsistencies (and is much less efficient on macOS). Chrome is widely chided for its poor memory management.
amelius 8y ago
How does it deal with DRM?
- s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
  They address that in the article (Encrypted Media Extensions)
- kingosticks 8y ago
  Their support pages mention widevine and the article states: > It drops Flash in favor of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) for music playback Although I thought they did that ages ago.
Dwolb 8y ago
Two things jumped out to me: 1) The extent to which how Spotify organized as teams completely affected the technical architecture and user experience. This is a situation where being deliberate about culture really matters! 2) Spotify feels very lead by engineering with design taking a back seat. You see this in the post by addressing the experience as more of a collection/list of features vs. a holistic experience.
- dickeytk 8y ago
  To be fair, this is an engineering “how the sausage is made” post, not a product one
- anoncake 8y ago
  Judging by its performance on Android, Spotify does not feel led by engineering at all. Then again judging by its UX, it cant be led by UX designers either.
altmind 8y ago
The article does not explain anything on their new app organization, on challenges they faced when redesigning, does not give any measured metrics. The whole article can be summed up in a sentence or two: We've redesigned from plain js and iframes to the stack we used for our TV app - react+redux, this made the app easier to develop. We also switched from flash to EME.
trixie_ 8y ago
I wonder if they're using TypeScript.
mromanuk 8y ago
I’m always waiting for a native Mac App, I love the product, not the Mac client. Spotify: you can port iOS to Mac now
kevinSuttle 8y ago
[In which Spotify doesn't actually explain what they did to build the new web player]
parley 8y ago
I am a paying Spotify customer since 2010 or so and have also spent countless hours developing software for personal use integrating with Spotify. I've used e.g. their old (now deprecated) C-library and now rely on the web API. Therefore I have no qualms on calling them out on some of their hypocrisy. Many music streaming services have no API:s, and those that do have (to the best of my knowledge) worse API:s than Spotify. I'm very grateful that they provide any means of integration. However, that doesn't get them a free pass to get on as high a horse as they try. Now for the part where I gripe. They recently created a dedicated site shaming Apple for, in part, not exposing the same internal API:s/abilities/possibilities to Spotify as they did to their own and perhaps some other third party apps. That's pretty rich. Where is the protocol specification or available-for-everyone library for creating a Spotify Connect endpoint? Locked behind Hardware Partner Applications, NDA:s, Evaluation Agreements, New Product Applications, Device Certifications and Distribution Agreements (yes, all of those, according to their own site). Talk about subjectiveness and forcing people to jump through a thousand hoops -- like they accuse Apple of. "and final approvals for commercial usage will always be left up to the discretion of Spotify and its partners". Three cheers for transparency and a level playing field. Where is the web API support for folders, a feature that you clearly use yourself in the desktop application? The web API has been launched for years without folder support. This feature is completely private and unavailable to others. In the GitHub issue about it that they closed with WONTFIX the motivation was in part that folder support didn't fit well into their REST API, which is some of the weakest sauce I've had in quite some time. I used your C library and I know that you implemented folders as "begin" and "end" markers in the huge, flat playlist list. Perhaps you regret that design decision, but if that makes it an expensive API call then rate limit it accordingly. Make it subject to change as you evolve. Just don't close it off and keep it private for your own apps. Yes, I'm annoyed. I've been a loyal customer, user, developer and fan for almost a decade. They get to expose or not expose any API they like, that's their prerogative. But what they don't get to do is gripe about the subjectivity and closed off-ness of others if they don't practise what they preach. I hate hypocrisy. If you've read this far, I apologize for spouting bile. Time to sleep, probably.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  The way they’ve handled the deprecation of libspotify is appalling. As you said I’m grateful that they opened their API up to use by others, but ever since libspotify got canned developing native apps around Spotify has become more and more dicey and restricted, with the most notable feature omission being streaming. Worse, they’ve been promising a replacement for years now and it still has yet to arrive. It’s disappointing that the only truly developer-friendly music service on the market has decided to clam up like they have.
gdulli 8y ago
I was a paying customer until I got too frustrated with the lack of a real desktop player. Forcing what should be real applications into the browser is awkward as hell.
- larrik 8y ago
  They're basically the only non-Apple streaming service WITH a desktop player, though. They even have a Linux client!
  - gdulli 8y ago
    I prefer playing local files and having the feature set of a real player like foobar2000. I was on premium Spotify for a year and found some value in having access to a wider library than my own. But ultimately I got too annoyed with the compromise of low-effort software.
  - seabrookmx 8y ago
    I'm waiting for the stream of "OMG but it's not a _native_ app it's Chromium-based garbage." I _love_ the Chromium/electron-based stuff because that's exactly the reason we have postman, Slack, Spotify, Skype, VSCode, etc. for Linux. Because it's minimal effort to make them work across platforms. A I'll buy an extra 8GB of RAM if it means I can run all the apps I want. RAM is cheap.
  - trts 8y ago
    Amazon Music has web player and desktop (Mac/Windows)
    - benbristow 8y ago
      Amazon's products never seem to be polished and always lacking loads of features though.
- est 8y ago
  I still have their beta era Spotify.exe which is 4MB in size lying on my disk. It no longer works, but I really appreciate the engineering effort in this piece. It was created by the same guy who wrote uTorrent.
superdaniel 8y ago
Would be nice if they put some work into their Apple Watch app too. Especially after they made such a big deal out of it with that website.
- aylmao 8y ago
  It's also fair to think that since it's so up in the air if the app will keep existing or what features they'll even be able to build, they're probably not sure wether they should keep investing on it or not /:

101 points by jbredeche 8y ago

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago

Link to new player: https://open.spotify.com https://open.spotify.com (built with React)

altmind 8y ago
I've been using this player for at least 9 months. This new player misses a lot of features that old web.spotify.com used to have. For example, you used to be able to sort songs by popularity in search results. Or you used to be able to start playing artist songs from all the albums. Now when you "play an artist", all you get is 5 tracks, and to listen for the rest you have to listen by-album.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
941dq9 8y ago
How is that new? Unless I'm in the wrong A/B group, I'd say I've been using the same player for a long time.

mlex 8y ago

The article seems kind of light; all of the stuff I expected to read was summarized in the "The Tech Architecture" section, then the article suddenly ended. It felt like they spent three sections on background information and only one on details about the new player.

9935c101ab17a66 8y ago
Yah I agree. There's almost nothing of interest in this article, which is a shame because I think it would be really interesting to hear more about the challenges, process and final product.

dirtylowprofile 8y ago

Their iOS is still slow. I am on a Fiber connection and everytime I open Spotify it displays “no connection”.

president 8y ago
I see this everyday as well. You would think they would have addressed this by now given how glaring the error message is.
- cruise9 8y ago
  I don’t know if it’s incompetence or ignorance but Spotify has some of the worst apps going around. Remember the bad old days when the UI didn’t even support rotation on phones?
  - bscphil 8y ago
    It's funny - I haven't tried Spotify in years so I have no idea if it's still bad - simply because Spotify burned their goodwill with me as a customer because of how bad their Android app was in the first year or so of their US launch.
confounded 8y ago
Anyone have any idea what causes this? Establishing a more complicated type of connection type for streaming (excuse my networking ignorance), or something DRM related?
PascLeRasc 8y ago
FWIW I used to have this issue until I opted into the iOS Testflight beta. It's been over a year and I haven't had it since. [1] https://testflight.apple.com/join/7lt2tesn https://testflight.apple.com/join/7lt2tesn

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

AaronMT 8y ago

What is not supported In Safari?

dddddaviddddd 8y ago
Based on a quick test of the web player in Safari with the user agent set to Chrome, something with promises is broken in Safari (relative to Chrome, that is).
- munk-a 8y ago
  Safari is terrible and I applaud all applications that are broken on it, when Apple breaks down and actually offers a cross-platform version of their browser for testing then my various things might start working on it... Until then, if you have an iPhone, download chrome.
  - deskamess 8y ago
    I thought there was an HN post recently about how browsers on the iPhone need to use WebKit. They were not allowed to be better (from a rendering perspective). Or perhaps I misunderstood that.
    - sciurus 8y ago
      You're right. Chrome and Firefox on iOS are WebKit-based.
  - 9935c101ab17a66 8y ago
    1) I think you can build webkit on Windows? Either way, webkit is available on multiple platforms. 2) It goes both ways, Microsoft only recently announced that new versions of Edge are coming to macOS in the future, and only because they are moving to Blink/Chromium. 3) Chrome on iOS uses webkit, soooooooo What actual complaints do you have about safari? I definitely don't think it's perfect, but Chrome has it's own weird issues and inconsistencies (and is much less efficient on macOS). Chrome is widely chided for its poor memory management.

amelius 8y ago

How does it deal with DRM?

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
They address that in the article (Encrypted Media Extensions)
kingosticks 8y ago
Their support pages mention widevine and the article states: > It drops Flash in favor of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) for music playback Although I thought they did that ages ago.

Dwolb 8y ago

Two things jumped out to me: 1) The extent to which how Spotify organized as teams completely affected the technical architecture and user experience. This is a situation where being deliberate about culture really matters! 2) Spotify feels very lead by engineering with design taking a back seat. You see this in the post by addressing the experience as more of a collection/list of features vs. a holistic experience.

dickeytk 8y ago
To be fair, this is an engineering “how the sausage is made” post, not a product one
anoncake 8y ago
Judging by its performance on Android, Spotify does not feel led by engineering at all. Then again judging by its UX, it cant be led by UX designers either.

altmind 8y ago

The article does not explain anything on their new app organization, on challenges they faced when redesigning, does not give any measured metrics. The whole article can be summed up in a sentence or two: We've redesigned from plain js and iframes to the stack we used for our TV app - react+redux, this made the app easier to develop. We also switched from flash to EME.

trixie_ 8y ago

I wonder if they're using TypeScript.

mromanuk 8y ago

I’m always waiting for a native Mac App, I love the product, not the Mac client. Spotify: you can port iOS to Mac now

kevinSuttle 8y ago

[In which Spotify doesn't actually explain what they did to build the new web player]

parley 8y ago

I am a paying Spotify customer since 2010 or so and have also spent countless hours developing software for personal use integrating with Spotify. I've used e.g. their old (now deprecated) C-library and now rely on the web API. Therefore I have no qualms on calling them out on some of their hypocrisy. Many music streaming services have no API:s, and those that do have (to the best of my knowledge) worse API:s than Spotify. I'm very grateful that they provide any means of integration. However, that doesn't get them a free pass to get on as high a horse as they try. Now for the part where I gripe. They recently created a dedicated site shaming Apple for, in part, not exposing the same internal API:s/abilities/possibilities to Spotify as they did to their own and perhaps some other third party apps. That's pretty rich. Where is the protocol specification or available-for-everyone library for creating a Spotify Connect endpoint? Locked behind Hardware Partner Applications, NDA:s, Evaluation Agreements, New Product Applications, Device Certifications and Distribution Agreements (yes, all of those, according to their own site). Talk about subjectiveness and forcing people to jump through a thousand hoops -- like they accuse Apple of. "and final approvals for commercial usage will always be left up to the discretion of Spotify and its partners". Three cheers for transparency and a level playing field. Where is the web API support for folders, a feature that you clearly use yourself in the desktop application? The web API has been launched for years without folder support. This feature is completely private and unavailable to others. In the GitHub issue about it that they closed with WONTFIX the motivation was in part that folder support didn't fit well into their REST API, which is some of the weakest sauce I've had in quite some time. I used your C library and I know that you implemented folders as "begin" and "end" markers in the huge, flat playlist list. Perhaps you regret that design decision, but if that makes it an expensive API call then rate limit it accordingly. Make it subject to change as you evolve. Just don't close it off and keep it private for your own apps. Yes, I'm annoyed. I've been a loyal customer, user, developer and fan for almost a decade. They get to expose or not expose any API they like, that's their prerogative. But what they don't get to do is gripe about the subjectivity and closed off-ness of others if they don't practise what they preach. I hate hypocrisy. If you've read this far, I apologize for spouting bile. Time to sleep, probably.

kitsunesoba 8y ago
The way they’ve handled the deprecation of libspotify is appalling. As you said I’m grateful that they opened their API up to use by others, but ever since libspotify got canned developing native apps around Spotify has become more and more dicey and restricted, with the most notable feature omission being streaming. Worse, they’ve been promising a replacement for years now and it still has yet to arrive. It’s disappointing that the only truly developer-friendly music service on the market has decided to clam up like they have.

gdulli 8y ago

I was a paying customer until I got too frustrated with the lack of a real desktop player. Forcing what should be real applications into the browser is awkward as hell.

larrik 8y ago
They're basically the only non-Apple streaming service WITH a desktop player, though. They even have a Linux client!
- gdulli 8y ago
  I prefer playing local files and having the feature set of a real player like foobar2000. I was on premium Spotify for a year and found some value in having access to a wider library than my own. But ultimately I got too annoyed with the compromise of low-effort software.
- seabrookmx 8y ago
  I'm waiting for the stream of "OMG but it's not a _native_ app it's Chromium-based garbage." I _love_ the Chromium/electron-based stuff because that's exactly the reason we have postman, Slack, Spotify, Skype, VSCode, etc. for Linux. Because it's minimal effort to make them work across platforms. A I'll buy an extra 8GB of RAM if it means I can run all the apps I want. RAM is cheap.
- trts 8y ago
  Amazon Music has web player and desktop (Mac/Windows)
  - benbristow 8y ago
    Amazon's products never seem to be polished and always lacking loads of features though.
est 8y ago
I still have their beta era Spotify.exe which is 4MB in size lying on my disk. It no longer works, but I really appreciate the engineering effort in this piece. It was created by the same guy who wrote uTorrent.

superdaniel 8y ago

Would be nice if they put some work into their Apple Watch app too. Especially after they made such a big deal out of it with that website.

aylmao 8y ago
It's also fair to think that since it's so up in the air if the app will keep existing or what features they'll even be able to build, they're probably not sure wether they should keep investing on it or not /: