Access to WebSockets [Why does Discord get access and not us?]

[EricRabil1]

Hi, I'm re-opening an issue that has been closed (#817), ignored (#1330, #538, Access to websockets - The Spotify Community, [Developer] Access to websockets for live playback... - The Spotify Community), or locked (#492) time and again.

It appears Spotify is continuing to allow specific third-parties to access their WebSocket APIs. It is simply private to independent developers like us. I'm reopening this thread as we have been ghosted yet again in our other threads. It's been over three years since Spotify said they're working on a solution – but they already have it. The API is ready, it is in production, and it is fast. It is simply private. Why can we not use it?

Original content:

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While I'm very thankful for the APIs Spotify provides developers, the lack of transparency/availability regarding the WebSocket APIs is making this a frustrating platform to develop for. This is further exacerbated when one reads through issues that are over a year old, saying that Spotify is still working on bringing public WebSocket APIs to third-party clients.

Additionally, though I will not go into detail, Spotify literally has WebSocket APIs that it uses for its web client. Why can't these APIs be made available to third-party users? They seem pretty data-rich to me, and stable enough to be deployed to your production software.

Moreover, I plead that the developers respond openly to this, whether WebSockets are coming or not, and not something opaque such as "the more time we spend on making sure people aren’t ‘investigating’ non-public APIs that they’re not authorised to access, the less time we can spend on making these APIs ready to be available to the public" (#817). This is not only unhelpful, but a childish response to a valid request. It was valid in 2018, and frankly, is even more valid in 2020.

Please, please release a public WebSocket API. Polling the API every few seconds is disgusting, wasteful for your servers and ours, and rate-limit prone.

x-post from https://github.com/spotify/web-api/issues/1558

[flotwig]

Yes please. The existing API forces apps to poll for "Now Playing" status if they want to live update, which is wasteful. I can't imagine that it is actually saving Spotify any time or money to encourage such a wasteful pattern.

[Geekie]

I 2nd this, to have a good way to display "Now Playing" you need to send a request every 1000ms, and its just a waste of our and their data... @Spotify, please start to care about 3rd party devs, who have been requesting this for years and all you have done is stay quiet...