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Windows RT App Store Spotlite Removed

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Windows RT App Store Spotlite Removed

Windows App store stopped 'Spotlite - listen to Spotify'. I uninstalled Spotlite yesterday from our Surface RT assuming I could re-install it but then found it not available! Spotlite support page message, dated early March 2015, from moderator 'hsalps' advised;  "...Spotlite will no longer be offered in the store because Spotify does not want us to continue. If you already have the app installed on your system you will be able to use it as long as you do not uninstall the app. Once you uninstall there is no way to get Spotlite...".

If that has been done because Spotify is at last going to provide an App for Surface RT/Windows 8.1 that will be great. If not I'm rueful that I'd not been made aware of this since Spotlite did permit me to listen to my Spotify playlists whilst creating documents, emailing or browsing - despite its limitations. 

 

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Ok. So apparently Spotify is joining the likes of Snapchat and others who don't want anyone providing apps to access their service, even when they don't provide one themselves for a platform. Anyway Spotidy should have provided with a decent metro app a long time ago. Maybe they plan to release an universal app when Windows 10 is released, but we can't even be sure of that, and the release of Windows 10 is quite far anyway.

 

It's a problem for me because I don't want to cancel my Spotify subscription, I have quite a lot of playlists and I enjoy using Spotify. However I will definitely test the alternatives more thoroughly. I'll probably start with Deezer since their app for both Windows Phone and Windows 8 are very good (Qobuz has no app for Windows Phone unfortunately). And if it suits me, well...too bad Spotify, but we'll have to break-up. 

 

Edit: I created an account on Rhapsody, I'll use the 30 days free trial to see how it is. So far it seems good, the apps for Windows and Windows Phone are quite fast and you can feel they are native apps. THe apps for Windows Phone is much faster than the Spotify one, even if it is much simpler than the Spotify it's effective at least ! What I like is that you can add songs to "your music" and not only to playlists (in Windows Phone app the category "your music" doesn't exist on Spotify). So no need to create a playlist for everyhting you can just add songs, and create playlists only when it's multi-artist. Much better approach in my opinion. I'll still probably try Deezer after my month of free trial but..I'll see.

You can count in another pissy customer.
Premium is about to expire and not having a metro app (even though I can run the x86) will make me test options this week to try and avoid paying premium again.

Spotify forced SpotLite out of the store. On the Spotify developer page they claim:

  1. Our users are very important to us. Let’s work together to give them tools to access, discover, manage, and share music. While doing so, please respect their data and privacy settings.
  2. We respect rights holders, artists, and music. We work hard to make sure that all of the music on Spotify is fully licensed in order to monetize all content on our service. This respect manifests itself in what we do (or don’t) support on our platform.

Well, it appears that their statements are bogus. Personally, I cancelled my Premium account and will use Iheartradio.

 

Change to  rhapsody? Good idea! I'll do the same!

You'll notice how Spotify eqplied so quickly? Yeah. Crickets. Time to get away from Spotify

Unless it is just me here in Africa, the SpotLite app does not seem to work anymore ... I have logged onto the http://play.spotify.com page and was greeted with a message "Please install Flash to enjoy this experience".  Luckily I did not install Flash and the page has loaded, albiet slowly.  Also the window keeps timing out, also the stream stops when the device goes to screensaver.  So all in all virtaully useless.

 

Very poor showing from Spotify support, especially since the Apple Music debuing here in a couple of weeks (three months of free usage will save me $30).

 

 


@bfisher666 wrote:

Unless it is just me here in Africa, the SpotLite app does not seem to work anymore ... I have logged onto the http://play.spotify.com page and was greeted with a message "Please install Flash to enjoy this experience".  Luckily I did not install Flash and the page has loaded, albiet slowly.  Also the window keeps timing out, also the stream stops when the device goes to screensaver.  So all in all virtaully useless.

 

Very poor showing from Spotify support, especially since the Apple Music debuing here in a couple of weeks (three months of free usage will save me $30).

 

 


Those are two different issues. Spotlite is a 3rd party app that has been discontinued by the developer because Spotify forced them to. This has been the official statement from the developer. Reasons for this are unknown. Could be that negotiations between Spotify and HSAlps were insuccesful, could be that Spotify was asking to high a price, could be anything. The outcome however was that Spotlite was forced out of the Windows Store and Spotify APIs have changed so much that the application has stopped functioning.

 

Play.spotify.com works and loads fine for me, not a single issue there ... The behaviour behind a screensaver in fact is typical to (some) (web) applications. Unless they have been developed to specifically take into account screensavers and other power saving measures governed by the OS, this behaviour will not change.

Really funny to tell us to install Flash these days 😉

 

Guess what, Flash doesn't run on tablets (well maybe Androids - haven't tried...)

Flash is not only a dead technology but also full of major security vulnerabilities.

 

Less and less platforms are supporting it and many are starting to drop support.

So, instead of replacing the RT app with an official one, they just removed it so we don't have anything at all.  That seems a bit asinine and quite rude.. I rather enjoyed having spotify on a more user friendly format.  I hope they will fix this come W10, until then, I'm taking it off my phone too.

I also find this unacceptable. The guy put a lot of effort into making a polished, working app for you. He did all the hard stuff.

 

If anything you should have been trying to hire the guy and making Spotlite official...

One more unhappy customer here. I just got a good deal on a Surface 2 for which I wanted to use for music/movies in my car. It sounds like Spotilite is exactly what I would have needed.I have been very happy with spotify for a few years now, but this is just disappointing. For now, the only idea I have left is to try and see if a Surface 2 can run an ARM version of linux. If so, it might be possible to compile the Spotify  Client for ARM and run it natively.

 

In my search for other alternatives, I came across this page that I would like to share: Spotify Success Stories / Microsoft Surface.I'm not quite sure what it means, but it looks to me like Spotify had done some sort of marketing campaign or advertisement with the Surface 2. If that's the case, I don't understand why they would advertise a product and also remove the only means of using their service on it.

Spotify is in no case better than any other company looking for more money and even does not have the guts to respond in any way to the complaints of windows users.

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