Desktop login through browser flow broken

[baerista]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Operating System

Linux

My Question or Issue

My spotify desktop logged out, and I'm unable to log in again through the provided flow. Clicking the "Log in" or "Sign up free" buttons do literally nothing. No tabs open, no popups, no console messages, no errors displayed in the app.  I've checked browser settings, cleared cache, reinstalled spotify, no firewall, disabled security sandboxes, tried chrome (normally I use firefox) and nothing has worked. In monitoring D-Bus or xdg-desktop, I don't even see the spotify application attempting to query the OS for the default browser. Debugging with gdb shows that clicking the "Log in" button spawns a thread that immediately terminates, with nothing happening.

This is flat unacceptable for production code. Not only is it a complete degradation of UX, I'm not even able to use the service I'm paying you for. I was forcibly logged out without notice even though I was last active literally yesterday. I'm not even able to find alternative OSS frontends because you've removed the username+password API the rest of the ecosystem used to authenticate with your services. (example bug demonstrating what I see across alternative clients, for illustrative purposes only)

The problem appears to be cross platform across any desktop installation, and similar threads show "solved" have the solution being clearly LLM-generated botspam that doesn't work.

To reiterate: I'm attempting to login to the official spotify desktop release for linux on my computer as a paying customer of 7 years and the software just doesn't work. No errors to search for, nothing unusual about my installation, just an absolute lack of anything happening at all.

[dr_axen]

I had the same issue and found out the app was trying to use some other browser I had as appimage. Once I deleted that appimage, I was able to authenticate.