Introduction Those of us using the Spotify Developer API to integrate with our solutions are finding it difficult keeping a real-time view of what is being played. We are having to repeatedly hammer the API to get playback status updates at least every couple of seconds for it to be reliable. This not only wasteful of resources for both ourselves and the Spotify infrastructure team, it's also slow and burns through API limits pretty quickly resulting in our calls being temporarily blocked, rendering real-time stuff useless. New feature proposal Provide access to Spotify websockets. This would not only reduce demand on Spotify's web API servers, it would speed up response times for integrated services and improve the quality of service for Spotify, ourselves as developers and service users alike. Spotify already has websockets in use for the Web Player (and a few premium clients), however these are locked down and we are not permitted to access it. The code is already there and should hopefully be easy to implement by the Spotify dev team and would really help us third-party developers out. What are websockets? For the layman who is curious what we're talking about here, websockets are a widely-used method for getting "push notifications" of updates by opening a single, long-running data connection over which updates are only fed when necessary. It's much faster, less overhead, uses less resources overall and prevents having to repeatedly hammer the Spotify API like this; connect -> poll playback status -> wait for a response -> analyse response -> disconnect -> process playback data -> sleep 2 seconds -> connect -> poll... With websockets it would look more like this; connect -> spotify sends current playback status -> (no data sent whilst user listens to track) -> track changed, spotify sends new playback status As you can hopefully see, this is far more efficient. Spotify dev team, please make this a reality, it'll help both ourselves and yourselves. Previous thread; https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Access-to-websockets/td-p/4955299
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