Spotify Pushing Their API To Motivate Independent Developers
An OSX developer from Spotify's labs came out with a new third party desktop client for Spotify to show off the power of the libspotify and CocoaLibSpotify API features. The client, called Viva, is only runnable on Mac OSX Lion systems and with those with a Premium Spotify account. It can be downloaded from here, or you can view and build it from source on Github. With it, you get a quick and buggy version of Spotify, but with some notably missing features from the standard version such as a visualizer. To be honest, Viva really didn't work for me at all. It told me that every normal track wasn't playable in my area, but as a concept it does point to an early 2000's Winamp era of customization of features for Spotify.
Spotify Opens Up The Door
Both the Spotify and the developer community were absolutely delirious when the news about libspotify, Spotify API, were released on Tuesday evening. At first.
"The libspotify C API package allows third party developers to write applications that utilize the Spotify music streaming service. Hopefully, this will enable and inspire you to build some really cool stuff. We’re looking forward to seeing what you can come up with." So far so good.
Then they read the Terms of Service and were not quite as happy.
- “Approved Device” does not include any mobile wireless handset or any other internet-enabled device that is designed to be handheld."
- "The Application Key must be embedded in your Application, including in all updates and revisions thereto, in a secure manner not accessible by third parties."
- "Spotify reserves the right in its sole discretion to revoke your Application Key for any reason or no reason, without notice, and to block access to the API and Service by the Application, without any liability to you or your users."
