Question about token expiration, and Developer mode versus Live mode

[anthonycee]

Hi everyone
I'm a university researcher, and we have a developer team who are creating an app for us that links to the user's Spotify usage - it is a free app aiming to help troubled adolescents self-regulate their emotions via music engagement.

The app users request authorisation for the app on Spotify so that the app can call spotify / currently playing API every 5 minutes. It works well, but what we have been finding is that the refresh token often expires. We are not quite sure if this expiration is happening because we are currently using a Spotify Developer Mode, or if it would continue to occur in live mode.

Just wondering if anyone here might be able to answer that? Alternatively is anyone aware of a way that we might be bale to get Spotify to whitelabel our server so that we can make calls on behalf of our app users without tokens expiring as often? One major hurdle I've been having is actually being able to contact someone from Spotify...there's no number to call and nowhere to send a direct message about developer queries.

Any help or direction would be much appreciated 🙂

Anthony

[spotifyjosh]

Hi @anthonycee,

Welcome to the community 🙂

Access tokens expire after a short while, irrespective of which mode your app is in. The expires_in query parameter or field can tell you exactly when the access token will expire. You can use the refresh token to fetch a new access token after the one you have has expired. More on refresh tokens and the authorization code flow here: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/guides/authorization/code-flow/