Access to websockets

[EricRabil1]

Hi, I'm re-opening an issue that has been closed (#817), ignored (#1330, #538), or locked (#492) time and again.

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

[EricRabil1]

Please, what is the harm in letting us use the WebSocket APIs? You'd attract a lot more attention for development and would have a much stronger relationship with developers. You already allow companies to use it en-masse, so why can't we?

[FAME_O]

Spotify is not for the people...

[flotwig]

Would really like to see an official response on this. It seems like such an obvious win for Spotify and developers alike, I would like to know the team's perspective on why this has not been added.

[TheNoim]

I can't follow what you wrote. What do you mean?

[avejack]

Sad to see that this still isn't a thing... Just startet to code a little Add-On for Home Assistant where a Webhook oder WebSocket API would be very useful...

[PixelBlob]

Was trying to hook spotify up to my music bot, pretty much finished adding it(Registering as a device spotify can connect to, seeking, etc) when I stopped using the token I got from dev tools to my surprise it stopped working. There goes my day lol 😞

[durss]

They clearly don't seem incline to open that API.
They actually restricted its use by requiring specific tokens (ex:spotify official or discord's ones)/
Putting time and effort to prevent developpers from using it instead of just opening it is a quite strong message to me...

Some years ago spotify officials said on github that "scaling this API" was the tricky point holding them back to make it public. Considering both desktop and web clients as well as discord and probably others (like google,...?) already use it, I find it hard to believe that opening it to developpers would make any difference for their servers.

Anyways... i guess we can only wait and see 😕

[0xearl]

This is sad.
I thought I'd get that realtime playback state, but polling is the way still..

[DarrenLau]

If you add a WebSocket endpoint we would not need to hammer your server with tons of rest API requests

[Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa]

Spotify, your developer community has been begging and pleading for this feature for more than 5 years and you’ve been teasing us by saying you’re working on it. Just tell us to eff-off already, so we can stop holding on to this small glimmer of hope that we can actually build cool apps that are used by more than just a handful of people before running into rate limits. 

[mcguirev10]

This is appalling. I sat down to add Spotify support to my app assuming that such a popular music player would make it trivially easy to retrieve basic data like the current track. Instead I discovered years and years of problems and apparent disregard for those trying to provide free support for this platform. Worse than disregard, Spotify's actions towards those who are even simply trying to understand and discuss what is going on have been outright hostile.

In my case, I am lucky that my users run the native Window client. Like so many others, all I need is track-change information. It's a trivial matter to query the processes by name and grab the current track from the window title. I can poll as often as I want with zero impact on anyone's servers. The information isn't robust or high quality, and isn't what I'd prefer to use, but for now, my users will be happy.

But as a developer, I am most assuredly not happy, and I am singularly unimpressed with Spotify. Their UIs are a confusing and inconsistent mess, their apps are buggy, their services are not inexpensive, they eliminated Stations -- the best automated music option other than the original Pandora, and now I find their API is effectively unusable and their developer support ranges from neglectful to abusive.

But hey they have a $34B market cap and a big deal with Tencent in China, so what do they care? We're Little People now.