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Almost all of these strike me as only benefiting a very small sliver of users, like well under 1%. An infinitesimal portion of Spotify listeners even know what

Almost all of these strike me as only benefiting a very small sliver of users, like well under 1%. An infinitesimal portion of Spotify listeners even know what dbus is. How much engineer time is it worth to improve something like that?

shaicoleman 6y ago
Spotify is a company with over 7 billion USD dollar of revenue in 2020. Linux is about 2% of desktop users, or about 1% of users in total. Nevertheless, they decided not to spend a dime to work on the Linux client ("Spotify for Linux is a labor of love") [1]. The Linux app is an electron app, so there's relatively little effort required to maintain it. Instead, they paid 100 million USD for Joe Rogan, and added video features that nobody wanted and asked for. Take a look at /r/JoeRogan [2], and see just the extent of how much reputation damage it caused. Take a look at /r/Spotify [3], most of the complaints are about basic functionality not working. MPRIS [4] is a dbus API standard for controlling music players. End-users don't know or care about APIs. End-users care about having music widgets, but you can't do that without it. End-users care about keyboard accessiblity when they need it, but you can't do it without those APIs. And Linux users specifically care about programmability. Limiting the API means that not only do I have to deal with the buggy app, it's prevents anyone else from building something better. It's been 10 years since the Linux client came out. One engineer could fix these issues in a couple of months, but it's just not their priority. The only saving grace for Spotify is that all their competitors are worse. 1. https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/ https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/ 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/ 3. https://www.reddit.com/r/Spotify/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Spotify/ 4. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MPRIS https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MPRIS

shaicoleman 6y ago

Spotify is a company with over 7 billion USD dollar of revenue in 2020. Linux is about 2% of desktop users, or about 1% of users in total. Nevertheless, they decided not to spend a dime to work on the Linux client ("Spotify for Linux is a labor of love") [1]. The Linux app is an electron app, so there's relatively little effort required to maintain it. Instead, they paid 100 million USD for Joe Rogan, and added video features that nobody wanted and asked for. Take a look at /r/JoeRogan [2], and see just the extent of how much reputation damage it caused. Take a look at /r/Spotify [3], most of the complaints are about basic functionality not working. MPRIS [4] is a dbus API standard for controlling music players. End-users don't know or care about APIs. End-users care about having music widgets, but you can't do that without it. End-users care about keyboard accessiblity when they need it, but you can't do it without those APIs. And Linux users specifically care about programmability. Limiting the API means that not only do I have to deal with the buggy app, it's prevents anyone else from building something better. It's been 10 years since the Linux client came out. One engineer could fix these issues in a couple of months, but it's just not their priority. The only saving grace for Spotify is that all their competitors are worse. 1. https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/ https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/ 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/ 3. https://www.reddit.com/r/Spotify/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Spotify/ 4. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MPRIS https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MPRIS