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This is great, but the sad truth is that unofficial clients like this can never grow big and support more than a few thousand users, given how ridiculously low
by soheilpro 5y ago
This is great, but the sad truth is that unofficial clients like this can never grow big and support more than a few thousand users, given how ridiculously low Spotify API's rate limits are.
My project https://volt.fm https://volt.fm has 100k+ users now and I'm really struggling with the Spotify API.
- CamperBob2 5y agoHow does the nature of the API determine the number of users?
- soheilpro 5y agoI meant rate limits. Edited my original comment.
- tim-- 5y agoThe trick would be to have each user register their own API key.
- ShroudedNight 5y agoThis seems like such an obvious answer, why isn't it significantly more common?
- kzrdude 5y agoBecause that will also self-select the audience to be really small.
- tim-- 5y agoNo, not at all. There are ways to implement this without making it a requirement to use the app. For example, you implement a counter for each user of the app, so they can only use a subset of the API requests allowed for your application. Then if they go over their allocated amount of calls, or they have been a user for X days/weeks/months, you give them a guided walkthrough on how to register their own API key.
- TchoBeer 5y agoI imagine for something like 90%+ of users, a popup that says "Your maximum number of API calls has been reached, click this link and register your own API key to continue using..." is an instant nope
- clashmeifyoucan 5y agothis, I wanted to make a little utility for getting lyrics for whatever song is currently playing on spotify[1] and ran into the issue for getting the song name without using the API since that's just inconvenient for the end user. The most popular such project does go that way though.[2] I ended up writing a small library that does that locally cross-platform by using the metadata from the app.[3] The approach is probably not as robust as the API, but much faster and works well. [1] https://github.com/SwagLyrics/SwagLyrics-For-Spotify https://github.com/SwagLyrics/SwagLyrics-For-Spotify [2] https://github.com/johnwmillr/LyricsGenius https://github.com/johnwmillr/LyricsGenius [3] https://github.com/SwagLyrics/SwSpotify https://github.com/SwagLyrics/SwSpotify
- OhNoMyqueen 5y agoThe Spotify API doesn't support private API keys, so you need to create your own OAuth App and then authorize it for yourself.
- tiborsaas 5y agoAlso, they can lock out out overnight and good luck appealing to the legal team.