An explanation is due on streaming and/or offline play for the Apple Watch

[andremarc]

I think many faithful Spotify users on premium accounts have cancelled them and moved over to Apple Music, due to Spotify's lack of support for streaming and/or offline play on the Apple Watch.

Whilst Spotify is a superior service on native apps, I too will be cancelling my account for the inferior Apple Music for this reason. We've been waiting and waiting, but it's simply inexcusable that services like Pandora can offer this functionality and that Spotify cannot or will not.

So the purpose of my post is to simply ask Spotify to be honest with it's community. They should be transparent, and answer the following questions:

Is Spotify actually coming to the Apple Watch?

If it is, what is a reasonable expectation on timeframe? Is it a month away, a year, something indicative.

If it is not coming to the Apple Watch, then just say it. Be transparent and honest. Just say we don't want to build it, or we can't build it. Say we don't want to pay the "Apple tax", or it's just not that much of a feature in demand compared to the development effort required. 

Either way, just put it to bed so that people can make the right decision on the service for them. Don't have posts about beta versions coming out, or leave it out there unanswered. Own it. Your faithful community deserves an honest answer on this issue after many years of silence.

[iBamse]

Yes, this is just sad.

They now support logins using AppleId, but still no streaming on the Apple watch.

My best guess is that their bad choice of audio codec makes it impossible to do without too much impact on battery life and audio quality and they are too proud to admit it. Pandora and Apple Music are using the much superior AAC+ codec, which does not have to be re-encoded but can be sent directly from the watch to the headphones. 

As family and friends will not leave Spotify I have been paying for two services and syncing a few of the playlists over to Apple Music.

[andremarc]

You could be right iBamese. If that were true, they could still provide sync capability though right, even if streaming wasn't an option?

[iBamse]

Possibly. But that would mean transcoding on the iOs device before syncing it to the watch, which may have implications when it comes to security. If it is transcoded on the phone into a file instead of a stream there will either have to be a private encryption key somewhere on the phone, or an unencrypted file will be transferred to the watch. This might not be in line with the licenses that Spotify have with the record companies. It might be possible to get around that if the transcoding is done on the server side and the files are synced from there. I doubt they think it is worth the effort though.  

[MattSuda]

Hey @andremarc  @iBamse 

Good news!

Spotify now supports downloads on Apple Watch. This will be rolling out over the next several weeks. Streaming on cellular watch connection is also supported.

Check out this Spotify news article for more info:

Enjoy More Ways Than Ever to Use Spotify on Your Apple Watch—Now With Downloads