[mullingitover]

Exactly, thank you. Apple is absolutely prioritizing short-term profits and their own ambitions before customers' feature requests in this area. Spotify, and every other music service, would've had integrations ready to go well before the iOS 12 launch if that was all it took for them to be given first-class music player status on iPhone.

[saagarjha]

Spotify has been given a number of APIs that lets them act similar to a first-party app in iOS 12. As far as I’m aware, they haven’t really used them yet.

[mullingitover]

So you're saying every third-party music app has the ability to be run with "Hey Siri, play [song] on [spotify/tidal/etc]?" and Spotify is blatantly lying? Because on their support forum they straight up say this can't be done.

[saagarjha]

That particular example isn’t possible (so they’re technically right): Shortcuts can only detect constant phrases. But there’s a easy way around this: split it into two parts, the first one detecting “Spotify play a song”, asks “which one”, then listens for the song name and plays that. A bit more cumbersome, but still fits the fixed-text restriction.