[avolcano]

As far as I can tell, Spotify doesn't really have a Developer Platform team, just a legal department enforcing their ToS. All of their various SDKs are poorly maintained with zero points of contact. I think it's just a handful of engineers who care, working in their spare time at an organization that doesn't have any interest in giving them actual resources.

For example: their web playback SDK has a provision about "contact us to use for noncommercial purposes," and there's a long-standing GitHub issue specifically about how no one has ever gotten a reply back when they email about this.

Meanwhile, when I had a problem with MusicKit JS - the Apple Music equivalent - I actually got a reply back within a few weeks from an Apple engineer about it that helped me resolve it. Obviously not the shortest timescale, but at least there's clearly some effort being put into it. It helps that they actually are using MusicKit JS to power their own Apple Music web player, while Spotify's playback SDK is a separate codebase, which is why it's missing features like Safari playback that are present in the web player.

Spotify's new mobile SDKs are also unusably awful, and can't do basic functions like "playing a single song and stopping instead of autoplaying onwards." They also have deprecated and killed off several past mobile SDKs that were far more feature-filled. I saw a new Spotify-powered radio app that launched recently (Station Rotation) appears to be using the legacy undocumented SDK for playback because of this - can't imagine that app will have much of a future if Spotify ever decides to finally break that SDK.

Honestly, I expect Spotify to completely kill their public APIs and SDKs within the next two years. They clearly see no value in them, or they would have invested in maintaining them.

[kitsunesoba]

They also slowly, semi-silently killed off libspotify without ever providing a proper replacement (despite promising such), taking down several open source clients in the process.

It's baffling. They could've had a distinct advantage being one of the only developer-friendly (and thus highly flexible/adaptable) streaming services on the market, but they instead decided to toss that in the garbage bin and push usage of the official client, which sees constant frustrating UI changes for no good reason.

[kingosticks]

I do agree with all of this. But I would say that despite all the screw-ups, missed opportunities and general incompetence, I think Spotify still offer the best features/API for developers. Which is a sad state for us.

[sbarre]

Yeah they've been on the "Twitter path" with their developer tools..

As they mature and double-down on value extraction from their existing customers, they are cutting off more and more interesting third-party services that helped them grow but are now seen as competitors or detriments to their revenue.

[toomuchtodo]

Time to fall back to scraping. In the event scraping is prevented, notify regulators (GDPR, CCPA).