Access to iOS/Android streaming SDKs

[Zeyu]

To the Spotify team,

Looks like Spotify is cutting access to the iOS/Android mobile streaming SDKs per recent news announcement:

https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/07/15/mobile-streaming-sdks-update/

While Spotify has been advertising the alternative remote SDKs, their functionalities are quite limited compared to the streaming SDKs, with no access to music/podcast content at all to build audio applications.

If the streaming SDKs stop working, with the previous announcements of sunsetting libspotify, developers would now lose all access to build any interesting audio application on Spotify. It would be a big blow to the companies that spent years building our apps, also at the expense of Spotify's subscribers as they lose access to our services.

As such, we would like to request Spotify to:

• Reconsider the decision
• Advise us of any alternative, or how to contact Spotify business dev
• Or extend the deadline until an alternative can be found

Otherwise it would be very disappointing as it barely gave us a month and a half of notice, considering the amount of time that went into building our apps, and we would have no choice but to migrate our users to other streaming services.

Thanks,

Zeyu

-- 

Zeyu Li

Founder & CEO

Mixonset Inc.

https://www.mixonset.com/

iOS App | Instagram | Discord

[PradyK]

Hello Spotify Team

We are makers of Boom app for the mobiles and we are using this Spotify framework that is being scheduled to be discontinued. We have based our entire business on Spotify and it's an important source of music for our users. We have to use this framework since we require the direct audio stream data for our app for it to work. The new SDK does not support this.

Removing the Spotify support would have a detrimental effect on our app and our business. We have been using Spotify since many years now and we have a good percentage of users who use the Spotify in our app. Removing this would be a great loss for our users since Spotify has the best collection of music. Our users love Spotify in our app. So it would be a very hard on our and in fact your premium users too if the Spotify support is removed.

We sincerely request on behalf of our entire staff to please continue the support for the old SDKs so as to ensure business continuity for us. We would really appreciate and be greatly indebted to you if you reverse this decision.

Looking forward to a positive outcome.

Thanks & Best Regards
The Boom Team

[wiiwiiw]

Dear Spotify team

I'm the creator of iOS app called Plum Music Player which for last 3 years has been one of the most popular music apps in App Store that supported playing from Spotify. It still relies on the "old" SDK which has proved itself to be a great piece of software and has been working great since long ago.

As others stated the new SDK in its current state is not a viable replacement as it lacks a lot of playback functionalities and requires user to have Spotify app constantly opened which unfortunately prevents us all to provide great UX

I'm really worried that this decision will mean end of my app's integration with Spotify and will force me to redirect my users to Apple Music which offers great support for 3rd party music apps.

I really hope you will reconsider that decision or at least postpone it at least until the new SDK is stable enough to be used as a replacement

Sincerely

[wiiwiiw]

I’ve posted about this issue on Reddit. It is a big deal for users

https://reddit.com/r/truespotify/comments/w5zc28/spotify_is_killing_integration_with_3rd_party/

[wiiwiiw]

I've spent the entire weekend trying to update the playback functionality in my app by replacing old streaming SDK with the new one.

My experience confirmed that it works nowhere as good as the old SDK. When using new SDK the connection between my app and Spotify is being lost constantly even though the music is playing in the background. I've encountered many more issues which have been discussed on Github but without any resolution such as:

Connection Errors on Initializing Spotify on iOS. · Issue #306 · spotify/ios-sdk

Cannot control music in app · Issue #324 · spotify/ios-sdk

One of the streams has reached the end · Issue #140 · spotify/ios-sdk

SPTAppRemoteCallRequest Code=-3000 "(null)" · Issue #200 · spotify/ios-sdk

And more.

The documentation for this SDK is really not helpful at all and the example app provided in the repo has those issues as well.

Dear Spotify team, with the others I ask you to reevaluate the decision about sunsetting the streaming SDKs. They enabled us to build high-quality apps that enhance the value of subscription to your service for many users.

We want to highlight this issue as much as possible because the current SDKs are making it impossible to create compelling apps for your subscribers.

Best regards

Adam Wienconek

Plum Music Player 

[wiiwiiw]

Bumping

[wiiwiiw]

Still no response from Spotify…

I suggest we try to reach them on Twitter, I’ve started here

https://mobile.twitter.com/plummusic_app/status/1556571189295857664

[sHaDySiCk]

I'm a user of this app, and I use Spotify to play my music through this app. I was very upset when I went on the app to see that Spotify no longer works for this app. And I paid for the lifetime subscription, never thinking this would ever happen. And it makes me upset because I paid for this app and I also really enjoy it. So, please Spotify, reconsider bringing back the support of SDKs.

[PradyK]

Hi Zeyu

May I ask how MixOnSet is still continuing to have access to Spotify and able to play the Spotify content without any dependency on the Spotify app? Would be great if you could provide us with some info about this.

Thanks

Boom Team

[Ximzend]

@PradyK,

It doesn't use streaming from Spotify, because that's discontinued.

In their FAQ you can read:

Why can't I stream certain songs on Apple Music or Spotify? Why are some songs greyed out?

While we’re adding more songs every day, it will take time before we can get the full Apple Music or Spotify Premium catalogue.

If they really used streaming from Spotify, they didn't have to add more songs, right?

[PradyK]

Yes, that’s what I am wondering. How are they getting the songs from Spotify and able to playback? Are the getting just the metadata and playing it from somewhere else or do they have a special kind of license with Spotify that allows them to stream content from Spotify directly? If they are using the web player then they should access to all the songs from the Spotify catalog but that’s not the case. What do they mean by 'adding more songs everyday'? Are they building their own catalog based on the songs in Spotify?

In fact we were first made aware of Spotify discontinuing their streaming SDK by MixOnSet founder itself. But they still continue to use Spotify. It would be great if Zeyu could provide us with some info about what they are doing, if not the details just a pointer would really help.

[Ximzend]

*beep*

[lyzkov]

I guess they've embedded Web Playback SDK in a hidden, thin web view.

From a technical viewpoint, they could also reverse-engineer a web client to obtain an audio stream through HTTP, but from a legal viewpoint, that would violate Spotify's terms and conditions. 🙂

The Mixonset source is closed; we'll never know...