Removal of desktop notifications

[Rorey]

On May 15th, we will be turning off the in-app notifications "bell" on desktop. We are continuously working to improve and simplify our notifications features, and this change will allow us to shift our focus to email and push notifications. We are also working on completely new ways of keeping you up-to-date with new album releases, helping you discover new music, and know what your friends are up to.

To make sure you have your email and push notifications set up the way you'd like, check out the steps here.

Please share any feedback you have here in the Community. We're listening, and will pass it all on to the team.

[pinkmoon]

As of version 1.0.34.146.g28f9eda2, the notifications app within Spotify has not been removed.

They’ve simply hid the button from the UI.

99c73,74
<           <div id="notifications">
---
>           <div id="notifications"
>             data-bind="style: { display: notificationsVisible() ? 'block' : 'none' }">

Perhaps they’ll remove it in the future or, one could speculate, perhaps it was a temporary change to help with the “stats” of “Release Radar”.

[Sphinxmorpher]

Whoever figured out this was an interface improvement need to work with something else. ASAP. Like making coffee for the new guy that is going to bring back the notification area.

The playlist radar thingie is not an alternative at all. 

If you want back the notification area, please vote:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Desktop-Bring-back-Notifications-from-followed-Artists/i...

[Sphinxmorpher]

EDIT: As of version 1.0.37.150.gad02a02e this hack is no longer enough - it seems the content for the notification area is stopped elsewhere.

I had hoped the interest for this hack would have opened the eyes of the Spotify product team, but no... 😞

If you want back the notification area for good, please vote:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Desktop-Bring-back-Notifications-from-followed-Artists/i...

----

1. Find zlink.spa and unpack it like a zip file. The location differs from OS to OS:

Windows: %APPDATA%\Spotify\Apps
Linux: /usr/share/spotify/Apps
Mac: /Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/Resources/Apps

2. In index.html change this (around line 74):

data-bind="style: { display: notificationsVisible() ? 'block' : 'none' }"

to 

data-bind="style: { display: 'block' }"

3. Save, repack the zip (with .spa extension) and place it at the original location

4. Restart Spotify..the notification icon is back now.

If Spotify only loads partially, you made a mistake in the editing (watch out you don't delete the last '>' character on that line), or there is something about the Zip format that doesn't work. You may just copy the whole unzipped directory over to the original location instead of packing it (dir name "zlink"), or use TotalCommander (I used that) to do the packing.

Note: this is an unofficial hack - it works for me - I do not know if it will work for you or if it is the "whole" solution. 

------

Thanks to pinkmoon for figuring out that they simply hid the icon.

------

If you want back the notification area for good, please vote:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Desktop-Bring-back-Notifications-from-followed-Artists/i...

If you want a new section for New Releases by artists you follow, vote here:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/New-Releases-Section-for-Followed-Artists/idi-p/949039

[Shirkhan76]

@pinkmoon and Sphinxmorpher

You save my day!!! Thank you for this hind! 

Greetz

ShirKhan76

[JamesBas]

Wow.

Now lets just hope they will not figurour a way to stop it all 2gtr

[Z3us]

@pinkmoon and Sphinxmorpher

Thanks you two! Love it when a plan comes together.

Now to the people at spotify I don't mind doing this at every release but if purposefully break this fix in another release I WILL be rethinking my renewal of the my subscription when my Vodafone contract is up in the next two months, (hint: I'm thinking about renewing at the moment.)

Thanks again

[Z3us]

@pinkmoon and Sphinxmorpher

Thanks you two! Love it when a plan comes together.

Now to the people at spotify I don't mind doing this at every release but if purposefully break this fix in another release I WILL be rethinking my renewal of the my subscription when my Vodafone contract is up in the next two months, (hint: I'm thinking about renewing at the moment.)

Thanks again

[Pone]

What did you repack it as? I repacked as zip without any compression and then renamed it but it doesn't work, when I open Spotify I see no UI at all. What software did you use? I used 7zip.

[JamesBas]

Just use builtin windows compression, do not use 3rd part compression apps.

[pinkmoon]

---

Sphinxmorpher wrote: 

data-bind="style: { display: notificationsVisible() ? 'block' : 'none' }"

to

data-bind="style: { display: 'block' }"

You can remove that binding syntax altogether.  

---

@Pone wrote:

What did you repack it as? I repacked as zip without any compression and then renamed it but it doesn't work, when I open Spotify I see no UI at all. What software did you use? I used 7zip.

It’s OK to leave the directory unpacked.

--- 

Anyway, it’s trivial to reverse the change and there are other ways to get around it, that’s not the point.

The point is Spotify needs to start listening to their customers.

I get it, machine learning is the kewl thing of the moment, but there's no need to shove it down our throats.

[Pone]

Thanks, it works! I think notepad also broke the html file so I used wordpad instead. I can't understand how it's still possible to do workarounds like this. Maybe they can't remove the notification system unless they also remove it for the mobile apps, or completely rewrite how it works (I don't know programming so I have no idea if this is a valid hypothesis).

[Pone]

.

[Pone]

"I get it, machine learning is the kewl thing of the moment, but there's no need to shove it down our throats."

Spot on! Developers have become obsessed with this. I don't mind the development of AI, but for completely different purposes. My music habits are so weird, "unthinkable" if you like, that there's no way an algoritm can make anything useful of it. Some days I listen to black metal, other days I listen to mainstream pop, next day obscure old school hip hop.

[jammint]

thank you so much, this edit totally worked for me (though it has to be redone every time there's a spotify install update. argh).

[rednblu]

Great alternative Solutions!

Please backup these Solutions to a "safe place"-- because the juvenile delinquents will be along any minute and vandalize any good solution they find-- That is their job. Lions do what lions do, and hyenas do what hyenas do. So please backup these Solutions somewhere so that you can re-post to Reddit or someplace "safe" that you can give us the link here.

I don't quite understand yet-- but in time I will figure out-- as I have before-- what you did from your clues here.

Congratulations! Solutions! Thanks!

[jammint]

I copied zlink.spa to another location, renamed to zlink.zip, extracted all files, edited index.html to remove notifications bind, saved, re-zipped, renamed to zlink.spa and copied back to the Apps folder. Voila!

[DerMoment1608]

Anybody has an idea what I'm doing wrong? I've changed

data-bind="style: { display: notificationsVisible() ? 'block' : 'none' }"

into

data-bind="style: { display: 'block' }"

but when I try to open Spotify I see only the menue bar, everything else is just dark-grey and a http://error.app.spotify.com/index.html page opens in my browser.

Edit: Must've been something with extracting/re-zipping or opening/saving the index.html file. Now I've opened zlink.spa with 7-zip-editor and changed index.html directly. Now it works, my bell is back! I'm so happy right now 😄 😄 😄 Thank you so much pinkmoon and Sphinxmorpher!!!!

Edit 2: Dunno if it's at the same place for everyone, but I found zlink.spa in this pathway: C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\Spotify\Apps. Maybe saves some time for searching it for others.

[syplex]

This is great, I now have notifications working and release radar.  Also, after doing some digging I increased the height of the notifications menu dropdown which has always annoyed me at how short it was.  These things will work until spotify completely disables their notifications backend, which I imagine will happen fairly soon because they think they have "job well done" the notifications.

In zlink.spa/css/style.css modify the height:

#notifications .dropdown-menu iframe {
  height: 280px;
  display: block;
}

I changed it to 600px and now I can see 7 notifications at a time!

#notifications .dropdown-menu iframe {
  height: 600px;
  display: block;
}

[Z3us]

Hey make sure the line ends with the > symbol .. Does that help?

[cali-tpk]

why i don't speak english ?! and google transtator is bad ! i see you find the solution but i don't understand , where i must look for zlink.spa ? thank you

[user-removed]

Here we go for people having a hard time:

1.) Open explorer and put this in the address bar (windows key + R works also):

%APPDATA%\Spotify\Apps

2.) Unzip zlink.spa somewhere, I chose to put it in a directory called zlink.

3.) Modify line 74 of index.html to read (I recommend using notepad++ for this):

data-bind="style: { display: 'block' }">

4.) Archive the files back into a zip by selecting all the files, right click, send to -> Compressed (zipped) folder.

5.) Rename the zip to zlink.spa

6.) Rename the original zip to something else so you have a backup.

7.) Copy your new zlink.spa to %APPDATA%\Spotify\Apps

Edit: Looks like its not on line 74 for some people but it should be around there, the original line looks like this:

data-bind="style: { display: notificationsVisible() ? 'block' : 'none' }"

Linux location (thanks SecretAgentFrog😞

/usr/share/spotify/Apps

Mac location (thanks tonistair😞

/Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/Resources/Apps