14 ms·

Please continue supporting iOS/Android streaming SDKs

122 points by pjmq 4y ago

claaams 4y ago
I was looking for motivation to cancel. Thanks.
pjmq 4y ago
As of September 1st, Spotify concluded its half-decade-long effort to stop developers from building experiences that allowed streaming outside of their own first-party apps. Starting with libspotify and then switching off their streaming SDKs earlier this month. An alternative to both was promised but none ever materialised. As a result, hundreds of apps still using this SDK out of necessity, have gone dark.
- hadrien01 4y ago
  Doesn't libspotify still work, albeit unofficially, because of old integrations in cars and other devices?
  - pjmq 4y ago
    It died in May if the Spotify dev announcement page is to be believed. AFIK both the streaming SDKs and libspot used the same APIs under the hood so if it wasn't dead before...
  - leephillips 4y ago
    It’s been working for me, installed on a Linux computer attached to my sound system: https://lee-phillips.org/spotifyRemoteLinux/ https://lee-phillips.org/spotifyRemoteLinux/ Bottom line is I can use the official Spotify client on my phone to get music from my stereo without using bluetooth.
anotherhue 4y ago
1. Embrace - come build on our open APIs! Make us more relevant! All welcome! It’s not going to be like Twitter. 2. Extend - That’s a nice feature you’ve got there, shame if someone were to copy it. 2a. Hey podcasts are much cheaper to produce than songs, we can make our own, and people will spend their time listening to those instead of expensive licensed music. Buy all the podcasters, control what they say! Selection for Societal Sanity! 3. Extinguish - you keep calling the APIs that make us pay licensing fees. We can’t push our own content if we don’t control the UI. Albums are expensive, you should REALLY try our cheaper playlists. No? Then good riddance.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bob1029 4y ago
I don't know if I even need to continue supporting Spotify anymore. Between Discogs and YouTube, I am having no trouble discovering and acquiring high quality content that can be used arbitrarily. For a period of time, I thought that old-school CDs were actually dead. Today, I get regular emails from la-la land records about incredibly esoteric 90s cartoon soundtracks that I can purchase new. I believe that there has never been a better time to get into physical media. I've got a lot of stuff on hand that you cannot listen to on Spotify. You won't even find some of these artists or "labels" in there. Spotify also puts me in a really bad mood when they decide certain content is no longer permitted for playback. Every time this happens I spend about 3 hours ripping my most recently-favorited tracks via audio driver trickery, just in case it happens again. The only value proposition for me is that their app is ubiquitous and can be controlled from any device. If I could find something similar to the Spotify application experience that I could point at my own backend, I think I might go for it. And, I totally get the other target audience: People who just want some mindless background music or podcast while they drive or do cardio. Spotify is amazing at this, but it's not really a big selling point for me. Definitely not enough value for me to pay a monthly subscription fee.
- mjr00 4y ago
  > Spotify also puts me in a really bad mood when they decide certain content is no longer permitted for playback. As far as I know, this is rarely Spotify's choice; usually this is done by an artist, or more commonly their distributor, intentionally pulling their music from platforms.
  - tartoran 4y ago
    Well, that’s because they get paid in peanut dust and breadcrumbs
    - mjr00 4y ago
      True but it's also really cheap to get/keep your music on there if you want. Distrokid is $20/year, CDBaby is $5 one-time per track/album, and if you just want Spotify specifically you can do it through Amuse for free (with slow release times and # of track limitations), or onerpm if you're willing to give away a % of the royalties.
laurentlbm 4y ago
I switched to Tidal a few months ago after getting sick of them pushing podcasts non-stop and some other annoyances. Tidal is fine, but I do miss all the user-created playlists from Spotify. I also still sometimes buy music through Bandcamp if it isn't available on Tidal or if I want to support the artist.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Where is the Tidal 3rd party streaming API/SDK? Or any API at all, for that matter? (Certainly not here: https://tidal.com/browse/artist/4481527 https://tidal.com/browse/artist/4481527)
  - cyberpunk 4y ago
    Tidal does seem to have some integrations (at least roon and volumio) MQA is largely snake oil; they do have some nice sounding masters though. Apple Music now has hires audio also. I’m yet to decide between the two. Apple Music is edging Tidal out for me due to the quality of their curated playlists
    - tpmx 4y ago
      Roon and Volumio both label themselves as audiophile audio players. I guess that's why I hadn't heard about any of them. Also, the term audiophile has turned into a red flag, at least to me. Isn't Apple Music hi-res/lossless audio (ALAC) also snake oil when compared to high bitrate psychoacoustic codecs such as those used by e.g. Spotify Premium? https://www.macworld.com/article/346595/no-one-actually-needs-hi-res-apple-music-audio.html https://www.macworld.com/article/346595/no-one-actually-need...
      - 8ytecoder 4y ago
        The article calls all lossless compression snake oil. Personally, I do like Dolby Atmos on Apple Music - especially for Classical.
        4y ago
BenGosub 4y ago
Does this mean that full song play from the API doesn't work anymore, or it's about something else?
- pjmq 4y ago
  essentially yes. You can use the web SDK to play songs but it's a very poor experience. Native apps can no longer play full songs.
  - Aachen 4y ago
    I'm surprised that was possible in the first place. How were there no clients that implemented Spotify then? I'd have loved to use something less shitty than the Spotify player, both on Linux where they keep breaking things that used to work and on Android where offline mode is a joke. The only third party Spotify player apps I saw were remote controls that just talked to a connected "device" (potentially on localhost).
    - pjmq 4y ago
      There were tons of unofficial clients, mostly open source efforts as Spotify didn't allow for any monetizable components in apps so it never made much sense to build a business off the back of it.
    - BenGosub 4y ago
      I would call the experience anything but shitty. And yes, there are numerous of apps building on top of this, I maintain an app in production that use it.
  - BenGosub 4y ago
    Is it temporary or permanent?
    - pjmq 4y ago
      Permanent. Spotify doesn't want apps streaming music through anything other than Spotify's own walled experience for a number of seemingly financial reasons others have highlighted here.
dehrmann 4y ago
It's probably related to licensing, either because it makes it too easy to embed songs where you'd ordinarily need a separate license or because it makes it too easy to rip to the stream.
rvz 4y ago
Sorry! It's their platform and they can kill all third party apps whenever they want to. I find it extremely risky to build an entire business out of someone else's unofficial API. To Downvoters: I'm trying to help you here. Did you not see the top comment about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactic that Spotify and many other companies have used for their API's? [0] Similarly, If your app is in trouble [1] and the upstream provider suspends access to the APIs, your business is totally finished, but not if you are a larger company providing the API (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc) So don't depend or build your entire business on someone else's API. [2] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725714 [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yolo-lmk-anonymous-messaging-apps-after-lawsuit-over-teens-death/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yo... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093796
- pduszak 4y ago
  official APIs*
- urbandw311er 4y ago
  It was not unofficial.
azinman2 4y ago
This is a link to a complaint. Can someone either point to the official announcement or go into detail about what was allowed and what changed?
- crtasm 4y ago
  Shutdown on 1st September: https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/07/15/mobile-streaming-sdks-update/ https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/07/15/mobi... related: https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/04/12/libspotify-sunset/ https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/04/12/libs...
darepublic 4y ago
YouTube has better music selection and with a little setup you can get the same quality of life features as Spotify.
- pjmq 4y ago
  But you can't legally build music apps atop YouTube/YouTube music from what I can see.
jrib 4y ago
I switched from google music to spotify because google made it impossible to use google music from an account on a custom domain with google home. Spotify is okay, but I wouldn't hesitate to move if something else is out there that has better value.
pjmq 4y ago
What boils my blood the most about this is the fact Spotify lured developers in the early days, filled out their functional gaps and got free feature validation through those developers, bought and shuttered the Echonest to ensure devs would mostly only build for Spotify and its (Premium) subscriber base and then invested nothing into the developer ecosystem after that, instead chipping away at the existing tools and stopped responding to developers emails. It feels like Spotify showed music devs a green pasture and then corralled them into a slaughter pit (so to speak).
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  This seems standard and entirely predictable progression of events, given that everything depended on proprietary, centrally controlled software and enormous pile of contracts? Has anyone expected anything else?
  - pjmq 4y ago
    You're not wrong. But if Spotify doesn't want to allow developers to be lab rats for wild and whacky ideas that are too risky for them to try themselves but could eventually either become or reveal the next big thing, they're leaving themselves wide open to major disruption.
    - matkoniecz 4y ago
      I hope so! Not entirely is it true, network effects may be really powerful here. And "negotiate with 18383838 copyright holders" is not a small task.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  This was a financial executive decision for sure. A lot of those tend to be hostile towards paying customers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tinkerbill 4y ago
https://github.com/xou816/spot https://github.com/xou816/spot still works for me. I use that on my Pinephone to play music. If/when that stops, to continue playing music on my Pinephone will require migrating to a self-managed collection. Disappointing but doable. Can anyone recommend DRM free music providers?
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  > Can anyone recommend DRM free music providers? I have some download from Bandcamp. +CD-ripped music from physical media I own.
effingwewt 4y ago
This is why I can't understand the whole streaming garbage. There one day, gone the next. I never could understand how people can just rely on always having internet, or the service, available. I get my podcasts from whomever's webpage and just listen when I have time and delete when done if not worth keeping. Hopefully this will be a learning experience for younguns. My own kids love spotify. They pay for premium (meaning I do), but still always complain. I will say some of the playlists they listen to have turned me on to some really cool music. I see that as their only value to me, personally, but I still download them to have a listen at-will. I truly feel so bad for all the devs who put so much time, effort, and money into something to be yanked. But I also can't imagine my project hinging on the whims of a random company.
- daveoc64 4y ago
  > This is why I can't understand the whole streaming garbage. There one day, gone the next. It's a rental model. If Spotify ever shuts down, I can switch to any of its competitors quickly enough and I have lost nothing. > I never could understand how people can just rely on always having internet, or the service, available. I've been using Spotify for over 10 years, and I cannot recall a single time where I've been unable to use the service due to being offline and the offline features of their app not working. Not that I am ever offline much these days. >Hopefully this will be a learning experience for younguns. Most young people (and most users full stop) are going to be using the official apps, web app, or supported third-party devices and aren't going to notice a thing.
  - rlpb 4y ago
    I tend to listen to the same music that I like. Additions to my regular listening collection are fairly slow. So it isn't quite the same for me. If it were the nineties, I'd buy an album every few months. I could stop paying, and still have my music. Admittedly, Spotify is good for instant access and discovery. But it costs more than what I would otherwise be spending on buying albums.
gaius_baltar 4y ago
That's why torrents will survive for the foreseeable future. People got clever about avoiding these bait-and-switch schemes now that spending 5 min torrenting and 150 MB of storage per album became the easy, safe and private approach again. Podcasts are a different case, however. Best option is just drop the ones that do not provide a RSS feed and let these authors linger. I'm just tired of streaming companies, both audio and video.
pjmq 4y ago
Others have been suggesting Libspotify still works for legacy embedded device reasons... https://github.com/mopidy/libspotify-archive https://github.com/mopidy/libspotify-archive seems to have Android and iOS builds.

122 points by pjmq 4y ago

I was looking for motivation to cancel. Thanks.

pjmq 4y ago

As of September 1st, Spotify concluded its half-decade-long effort to stop developers from building experiences that allowed streaming outside of their own first-party apps. Starting with libspotify and then switching off their streaming SDKs earlier this month. An alternative to both was promised but none ever materialised. As a result, hundreds of apps still using this SDK out of necessity, have gone dark.

hadrien01 4y ago
Doesn't libspotify still work, albeit unofficially, because of old integrations in cars and other devices?
- pjmq 4y ago
  It died in May if the Spotify dev announcement page is to be believed. AFIK both the streaming SDKs and libspot used the same APIs under the hood so if it wasn't dead before...
- leephillips 4y ago
  It’s been working for me, installed on a Linux computer attached to my sound system: https://lee-phillips.org/spotifyRemoteLinux/ https://lee-phillips.org/spotifyRemoteLinux/ Bottom line is I can use the official Spotify client on my phone to get music from my stereo without using bluetooth.

anotherhue 4y ago

1. Embrace - come build on our open APIs! Make us more relevant! All welcome! It’s not going to be like Twitter. 2. Extend - That’s a nice feature you’ve got there, shame if someone were to copy it. 2a. Hey podcasts are much cheaper to produce than songs, we can make our own, and people will spend their time listening to those instead of expensive licensed music. Buy all the podcasters, control what they say! Selection for Societal Sanity! 3. Extinguish - you keep calling the APIs that make us pay licensing fees. We can’t push our own content if we don’t control the UI. Albums are expensive, you should REALLY try our cheaper playlists. No? Then good riddance.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bob1029 4y ago

I don't know if I even need to continue supporting Spotify anymore. Between Discogs and YouTube, I am having no trouble discovering and acquiring high quality content that can be used arbitrarily. For a period of time, I thought that old-school CDs were actually dead. Today, I get regular emails from la-la land records about incredibly esoteric 90s cartoon soundtracks that I can purchase new. I believe that there has never been a better time to get into physical media. I've got a lot of stuff on hand that you cannot listen to on Spotify. You won't even find some of these artists or "labels" in there. Spotify also puts me in a really bad mood when they decide certain content is no longer permitted for playback. Every time this happens I spend about 3 hours ripping my most recently-favorited tracks via audio driver trickery, just in case it happens again. The only value proposition for me is that their app is ubiquitous and can be controlled from any device. If I could find something similar to the Spotify application experience that I could point at my own backend, I think I might go for it. And, I totally get the other target audience: People who just want some mindless background music or podcast while they drive or do cardio. Spotify is amazing at this, but it's not really a big selling point for me. Definitely not enough value for me to pay a monthly subscription fee.

mjr00 4y ago
> Spotify also puts me in a really bad mood when they decide certain content is no longer permitted for playback. As far as I know, this is rarely Spotify's choice; usually this is done by an artist, or more commonly their distributor, intentionally pulling their music from platforms.
- tartoran 4y ago
  Well, that’s because they get paid in peanut dust and breadcrumbs
  - mjr00 4y ago
    True but it's also really cheap to get/keep your music on there if you want. Distrokid is $20/year, CDBaby is $5 one-time per track/album, and if you just want Spotify specifically you can do it through Amuse for free (with slow release times and # of track limitations), or onerpm if you're willing to give away a % of the royalties.

laurentlbm 4y ago

I switched to Tidal a few months ago after getting sick of them pushing podcasts non-stop and some other annoyances. Tidal is fine, but I do miss all the user-created playlists from Spotify. I also still sometimes buy music through Bandcamp if it isn't available on Tidal or if I want to support the artist.

tpmx 4y ago
Where is the Tidal 3rd party streaming API/SDK? Or any API at all, for that matter? (Certainly not here: https://tidal.com/browse/artist/4481527 https://tidal.com/browse/artist/4481527)
- cyberpunk 4y ago
  Tidal does seem to have some integrations (at least roon and volumio) MQA is largely snake oil; they do have some nice sounding masters though. Apple Music now has hires audio also. I’m yet to decide between the two. Apple Music is edging Tidal out for me due to the quality of their curated playlists
  - tpmx 4y ago
    Roon and Volumio both label themselves as audiophile audio players. I guess that's why I hadn't heard about any of them. Also, the term audiophile has turned into a red flag, at least to me. Isn't Apple Music hi-res/lossless audio (ALAC) also snake oil when compared to high bitrate psychoacoustic codecs such as those used by e.g. Spotify Premium? https://www.macworld.com/article/346595/no-one-actually-needs-hi-res-apple-music-audio.html https://www.macworld.com/article/346595/no-one-actually-need...
    - 8ytecoder 4y ago
      The article calls all lossless compression snake oil. Personally, I do like Dolby Atmos on Apple Music - especially for Classical.
      - 4y ago

BenGosub 4y ago

Does this mean that full song play from the API doesn't work anymore, or it's about something else?

pjmq 4y ago
essentially yes. You can use the web SDK to play songs but it's a very poor experience. Native apps can no longer play full songs.
- Aachen 4y ago
  I'm surprised that was possible in the first place. How were there no clients that implemented Spotify then? I'd have loved to use something less shitty than the Spotify player, both on Linux where they keep breaking things that used to work and on Android where offline mode is a joke. The only third party Spotify player apps I saw were remote controls that just talked to a connected "device" (potentially on localhost).
  - pjmq 4y ago
    There were tons of unofficial clients, mostly open source efforts as Spotify didn't allow for any monetizable components in apps so it never made much sense to build a business off the back of it.
  - BenGosub 4y ago
    I would call the experience anything but shitty. And yes, there are numerous of apps building on top of this, I maintain an app in production that use it.
- BenGosub 4y ago
  Is it temporary or permanent?
  - pjmq 4y ago
    Permanent. Spotify doesn't want apps streaming music through anything other than Spotify's own walled experience for a number of seemingly financial reasons others have highlighted here.

dehrmann 4y ago

It's probably related to licensing, either because it makes it too easy to embed songs where you'd ordinarily need a separate license or because it makes it too easy to rip to the stream.

rvz 4y ago

Sorry! It's their platform and they can kill all third party apps whenever they want to. I find it extremely risky to build an entire business out of someone else's unofficial API. To Downvoters: I'm trying to help you here. Did you not see the top comment about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactic that Spotify and many other companies have used for their API's? [0] Similarly, If your app is in trouble [1] and the upstream provider suspends access to the APIs, your business is totally finished, but not if you are a larger company providing the API (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc) So don't depend or build your entire business on someone else's API. [2] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725714 [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yolo-lmk-anonymous-messaging-apps-after-lawsuit-over-teens-death/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yo... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093796

pduszak 4y ago
official APIs*
urbandw311er 4y ago
It was not unofficial.

azinman2 4y ago

This is a link to a complaint. Can someone either point to the official announcement or go into detail about what was allowed and what changed?

crtasm 4y ago
Shutdown on 1st September: https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/07/15/mobile-streaming-sdks-update/ https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/07/15/mobi... related: https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/04/12/libspotify-sunset/ https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/04/12/libs...

darepublic 4y ago

YouTube has better music selection and with a little setup you can get the same quality of life features as Spotify.

pjmq 4y ago
But you can't legally build music apps atop YouTube/YouTube music from what I can see.

jrib 4y ago

I switched from google music to spotify because google made it impossible to use google music from an account on a custom domain with google home. Spotify is okay, but I wouldn't hesitate to move if something else is out there that has better value.

pjmq 4y ago

What boils my blood the most about this is the fact Spotify lured developers in the early days, filled out their functional gaps and got free feature validation through those developers, bought and shuttered the Echonest to ensure devs would mostly only build for Spotify and its (Premium) subscriber base and then invested nothing into the developer ecosystem after that, instead chipping away at the existing tools and stopped responding to developers emails. It feels like Spotify showed music devs a green pasture and then corralled them into a slaughter pit (so to speak).

matkoniecz 4y ago
This seems standard and entirely predictable progression of events, given that everything depended on proprietary, centrally controlled software and enormous pile of contracts? Has anyone expected anything else?
- pjmq 4y ago
  You're not wrong. But if Spotify doesn't want to allow developers to be lab rats for wild and whacky ideas that are too risky for them to try themselves but could eventually either become or reveal the next big thing, they're leaving themselves wide open to major disruption.
  - matkoniecz 4y ago
    I hope so! Not entirely is it true, network effects may be really powerful here. And "negotiate with 18383838 copyright holders" is not a small task.
eurasiantiger 4y ago
This was a financial executive decision for sure. A lot of those tend to be hostile towards paying customers.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tinkerbill 4y ago

https://github.com/xou816/spot https://github.com/xou816/spot still works for me. I use that on my Pinephone to play music. If/when that stops, to continue playing music on my Pinephone will require migrating to a self-managed collection. Disappointing but doable. Can anyone recommend DRM free music providers?

matkoniecz 4y ago
> Can anyone recommend DRM free music providers? I have some download from Bandcamp. +CD-ripped music from physical media I own.

effingwewt 4y ago

This is why I can't understand the whole streaming garbage. There one day, gone the next. I never could understand how people can just rely on always having internet, or the service, available. I get my podcasts from whomever's webpage and just listen when I have time and delete when done if not worth keeping. Hopefully this will be a learning experience for younguns. My own kids love spotify. They pay for premium (meaning I do), but still always complain. I will say some of the playlists they listen to have turned me on to some really cool music. I see that as their only value to me, personally, but I still download them to have a listen at-will. I truly feel so bad for all the devs who put so much time, effort, and money into something to be yanked. But I also can't imagine my project hinging on the whims of a random company.

daveoc64 4y ago
> This is why I can't understand the whole streaming garbage. There one day, gone the next. It's a rental model. If Spotify ever shuts down, I can switch to any of its competitors quickly enough and I have lost nothing. > I never could understand how people can just rely on always having internet, or the service, available. I've been using Spotify for over 10 years, and I cannot recall a single time where I've been unable to use the service due to being offline and the offline features of their app not working. Not that I am ever offline much these days. >Hopefully this will be a learning experience for younguns. Most young people (and most users full stop) are going to be using the official apps, web app, or supported third-party devices and aren't going to notice a thing.
- rlpb 4y ago
  I tend to listen to the same music that I like. Additions to my regular listening collection are fairly slow. So it isn't quite the same for me. If it were the nineties, I'd buy an album every few months. I could stop paying, and still have my music. Admittedly, Spotify is good for instant access and discovery. But it costs more than what I would otherwise be spending on buying albums.

gaius_baltar 4y ago

That's why torrents will survive for the foreseeable future. People got clever about avoiding these bait-and-switch schemes now that spending 5 min torrenting and 150 MB of storage per album became the easy, safe and private approach again. Podcasts are a different case, however. Best option is just drop the ones that do not provide a RSS feed and let these authors linger. I'm just tired of streaming companies, both audio and video.

pjmq 4y ago

Others have been suggesting Libspotify still works for legacy embedded device reasons... https://github.com/mopidy/libspotify-archive https://github.com/mopidy/libspotify-archive seems to have Android and iOS builds.