Spotify Pauses Plans to Add AirPlay 2 Support to iOS App [Update: Spotify Clarifies]

[iterva]

3: I like how Spotify is in sync on all your devices. For example I can be at the house listening on one device, get into the car with my phone and it’s the same queue, on the same song at the same time code. Get to the office and pick up playback on my computer right where I left off. I used a service a long time ago called Rdio that also did this and I loved it.

This! So much! 😂 Haven't even thought about this since I am so used to having it! Would annoy the heck out of me if I needed to search/start over every time I started playback from a new device.

 

[B/D]

This! So much! 😂 Haven't even thought about this since I am so used to having it! Would annoy the heck out of me if I needed to search/start over every time I started playback from a new device.

The funny thing about this regarding Apple Music is that Apple has a native functionality since IOS 8 / Mac Os Yosemite call handoff. Why they didnt implemented it on Apple Music to achieve this (among other things), is beyond me.

 

[Benjamin Nabulsi]

Wait until you find out how terrible Apple is with taxes…

How is that relevant? Amazon is royal at tax and vendors abuse

 

[iterva]

The funny thing about this regarding Apple Music is that Apple has a native functionality since IOS 8 / Mac Os Yosemite call handoff. Why they didnt implemented it on Apple Music to achieve this (among other things), is beyond me.

Wow. Really? Such a oversight from Apple in my opinion. Or intentional. Which, to be honest seems more likely in my book. I can't imagine that not a single person working with Music would not have at least mentioned a feature like Handoff during their development meetings and/or getting user feedback requesting this.

Oh well.

 

[Uofmtiger]

Interesting article from Wired

All the Ways Spotify Tracks You—and How to Stop It

Whether you're listening to workout music or a "cooking dinner" playlist, the app can show you ads based on your mood and what you're doing right now.

www.wired.com

 

[B/D]

Wow. Really? Such a oversight from Apple in my opinion. Or intentional. Which, to be honest seems more likely in my book. I can't imagine that not a single person working with Music would not have at least mentioned a feature like Handoff during their development meetings and/or getting user feedback requesting this.

Oh well.

The feature allows you things like continuing browsing the web exactly where you left in another device. Or continue writing an email. Or a text document. It even allows you to copy and paste things between devices (text, photos, videos) with the same Apple ID, or answering calls in several devices. Its amazing.

This exists, as a native feature of Apple´s operating systems, since 2014. 2014!. Apple Music launched in 2015... without this.

 

[Maconplasma]

What does it matter if there is a two second lag for music?

It does matter when I'm choosing the right music streaming platform and I don't want any lag with Airplay. Another reason I'm sticking with the superior Apple Music. To hell with Spotify.

 

[-BigMac-]

1. It’s better
2. It has more songs
3. It has much better recommendations and radios
4. Apple, being Apple, provides mediocre services and support outside the US and some countries in Europe ( mediocre localization, no localize customer service - English only, much smaller library in Apple Music due to incomplete international licenses, etc…)

In my country, Spotify heavily invested in localization, publicly modifying their recommendation algorithm to to adjust local opinion and preferences.

You forgot to say Spotify is basically broke, doesnt yet have hifi and pays artists next to f**k all😃😂

 

[Jack Neill]

I still don't know why any iPhone people have Spotify over Apple Music

I had thought about switching back to Music but after getting my Car Thing, I'll stay with Spotify.

 

[PBRsg]

This makes no sense. Supporting AirPlay 2 is not a lot of work - the SDKs pretty much do it for you.

I agree and Spotify is not a small company. There must be more to this.

 

[Smearbrick]

So if this has been updated, should this article be removed?

 

[Benjamid]

I still don't know why any iPhone people have Spotify over Apple Music

Because the majority uses it. music has lossless and auto scrolling lyrics. On top of it, it looks great and is cheap BUT your friends use Spotify and you want to share playlists, you got to use Spotify.

 

[Denzo]

I left Spotify last year when I got my Apple Watch. Haven’t noticed a difference. Apparently Spotify can stream to a watch now. Well done for Spotify. Too late for me.

 

[littyboy]

Sounds a whole lot like a cop-out response after the bad PR from not having plans of doing it. Instead they want to leave it as "its in the works... in the future" which means absolutely NOTHING.

That being said, I'm still a Spotify user.

 

[Caviar_X]

Apple Music is trash. There’s nothing else out there that competes with Spotify.

 

[xyz01]

Since I bought my Airpods Max I've been trying out Apple Music for few months as it has lossless support.

Unless Apple improves Apple Music dramatically, I just cant switch to it from Spotify. Here are some main reasons:

1. It's buggy as hell, some songs only play 15 seconds, some just give an error. If you add two same tracks to a playlist, you can only remove them both or have duplicates there. With lossless songs it sometimes randomly plays super loud static that had to remove my headphones to protect my hearing. Sometimes it just pauses playing for no reason at all.
2. The search is absolutely horrible. Even if you enter the full song name sometimes it just can't find it or it lists songs first that are completely different named.
3. Discovering new music is really hard compared to Spotify
4. Trying to see the full album or browsing more music from an artist is super difficult.
5. The general UX is not even close to Spotify experience.
6. Spotify ecosystem is really good especially if you have mixed mac/pc/whatever environment

Your reason for trying out Apple Music is flawed - AirPods Max don't support lossless audio. Apple Music does, but since the headphones don't support the best codecs for this use case it doesn't matter. AirPods Max was seemingly designed unaware of this feature - probably indicating that the AirPods Max team was come too far to change when someone inside Apple decided to go for lossless sound quality.

 

[xyz01]

One question: Why does Airplay 2 for Spotify matter?

Spotify already supports Spotify Connect, which is supported on a far broader device range than Airplay 2. On the top of my head, I'm guessing the HomePod is the only device that that don't support it or run Spotify natively. HomePod is dead, and the HomePod mini isn't doing too great either - if it was a success, it wouldn't have so limited availability (just a couple of countries, not including Norway where I live).

Spotify Connect is superior to Airplay for this specific purpose - playing music from a streaming app on a separate device. For one, it separates between the music streamed to the device and the other sounds on your local device. No interruptions to the music everyone listens to because you wanted to see a short tutorial on something on YouTube.

And that aside - if you really want to use airplay from a phone, Spotify works with that as well.

TL;DR: Airplay is great for streaming the sound of the device, but Spotify supports Spotify Connect which is better and works everywhere except HomePod. HomePod is dead.

 

[xyz01]

1. Not if you a) work for them b) Want to be paid by them as an employee or Artist.
2. Hmm - Well as of May 21 - Apple Music = 75 Million - Spotify - 70 Million. Not that matter I can't have heard more than about 2.8 Million of them
3. I'll give you the Recommendations - Radio is 99% poop, annoying DJs and adverts.
4. ok. Shrug. So in YOUR country Spotify is better... see point 1. Unethical, Cash mongers.

AFAIK, you don't get paid less for Spotify in total. Spotify users just use the app more, so there is a bigger number of plays to share the same revenue on.

Someone suggested that it would be more fair to split the revenue on an individual basis, rather than on the global pool. This would reduce payment to the kind of artist that are streamed all day, but give more to artists played by more active listeners (Less to top 10, more to more niche music).

 

[joecomo]

This makes no sense. Supporting AirPlay 2 is not a lot of work - the SDKs pretty much do it for you.

The suits, that made the statement probably have no clue anyhow ...

 

[joecomo]

Well if this takes as long as the Apple Watch Offline support to implement - I am long gone to Apple Music by then ...
(Shairport Airplay 2 support is progressing - so the clock is ticking )

 

[joecomo]

1. It’s better
2. It has more songs
3. It has much better recommendations and radios
4. Apple, being Apple, provides mediocre services and support outside the US and some countries in Europe ( mediocre localization, no localize customer service - English only, much smaller library in Apple Music due to incomplete international licenses, etc…)

In my country, Spotify heavily invested in localization, publicly modifying their recommendation algorithm to to adjust local opinion and preferences.

But they don't integrate well into the Apple Ecosystem - took them a century to support the Apple Watch and another one for offline Files. Roll-Out was abysmal and the implementation still sucks.

Same stage different play for Airplay2.

On the other hand they complain about being locked out by Apple (might not be totally untrue - but 90% of the blocking
is due to themselves not implementing features).

They should get less lawyers and more engineers (and they can keep the "music people" that curate the playlists - which is where they excel)

 

[joecomo]

One question: Why does Airplay 2 for Spotify matter?

Spotify already supports Spotify Connect, which is supported on a far broader device range than Airplay 2. On the top of my head, I'm guessing the HomePod is the only device that that don't support it or run Spotify natively. HomePod is dead, and the HomePod mini isn't doing too great either - if it was a success, it wouldn't have so limited availability (just a couple of countries, not including Norway where I live).

Spotify Connect is superior to Airplay for this specific purpose - playing music from a streaming app on a separate device. For one, it separates between the music streamed to the device and the other sounds on your local device. No interruptions to the music everyone listens to because you wanted to see a short tutorial on something on YouTube.

And that aside - if you really want to use airplay from a phone, Spotify works with that as well.

TL;DR: Airplay is great for streaming the sound of the device, but Spotify supports Spotify Connect which is better and works everywhere except HomePod. HomePod is dead.

but no Multiroom for Spotify Connect - if they implement that AND integrate it well into iOS, we can talk.
But this will never happen ...

 

[joecomo]

Is this because AVFoundation doesn’t support OGG? I’ll have to read up. I’m not sure if Spotify is even using OGG anymore.

Hmm, did a quick search and it looks like AVFoundation supports just about every common codec, even some uncommon codecs, but not OGG. I suspect this is the roadblock. The whole point of buffered audio is so the device can simply hand off the stream URL to the speaker. If the stream is in a format that AVFoundation doesn’t support then you would need to transcode. So you would need to to do server side transcoding. I guess Spotify doesn’t want to take on the additional server resources for that. So the only reasonable solution would be Apple adding OGG support to AVFoundation. I doubt Apple will go out of their way for a company that is actively suing them. This is all my own personal speculation, I could be way off.

All I know is I’m supper bummed about this because I love Spotify and now that shairport-sync supports AirPlay2 I’m really wishing Spotify supported buffered audio. This will most likely cause me to switch back to Apple Music.

I am in the same boat as you - what are your experiences with shairport-sync? I am thinking of trying the dev version on an RPI4 - seems the sync works by now and only less central features (like cover thumbnails) still need implementation.

 

[joecomo]

My main reasons for preferring Spotify is:
1: I got sick of clicking on the album name if the current plying track and it only randomly working. No errors, it just ignored the click. I joined AM in the beta phase and had it for about 3 years and it seemed they were never going to fix this. Today it seems like it’s fixed but I’ve already jumped ship.
2: I hated how you would lose your queue if you accidentally force closed the app. This also seemed to finally get fixed several years after launch.
3: I like how Spotify is in sync on all your devices. For example I can be at the house listening on one device, get into the car with my phone and it’s the same queue, on the same song at the same time code. Get to the office and pick up playback on my computer right where I left off. I used a service a long time ago called Rdio that also did this and I loved it.
4: Music discovery is terrible on AM compared to Spotify.
5: There are open source Spotify Connect clients for Linux making it easy to use a Raspberry Pi to make any speakers Spotify compatible. Or you can have one server with several sound cards to run music all through the house.

good points - but it seems that (with the exception of Nr. 4 - and the in my view better playlists) the gap has shrunk.
Specially point 5 (see Shairport )

 

[joecomo]

That is actually a blatant lie on part of Spotify’s part.

Real reason is simple: unless Apple makes App Store more fair under Spotify’s terms, they have suspended implementation of new iOS features into the Spotify app as protest.

This includes adding native support for HomePod. Apple in fact reached out to Spotify about adding native support before launch of HomePod mini, but Spotify never responded.

That is according to rumor from industry source.

in fact, they may pull nuclear and discontinue iOS app altogether and encourage users to get an Android phone. Hell, there is far fetched rumor that they are in fact making their own Android phone.

either way, Spotify is one being a !€£% here would not be surprised if US government steps in and accuse Spotify of running a cartel, because Apple’s terms are very fair and square.

I won't argue against - but that is the most stupid strategy I could imagine. Seems to come right from Steve Balmers playbook ...