Access to websockets

[EricRabil]

Hi, I'm re-opening an issue that has been closed (#817), ignored (#1330, #538), or locked (#492) time and again.

While I'm very thankful for the APIs Spotify provides developers, the lack of transparency/availability regarding the WebSocket APIs is making this a frustrating platform to develop for. This is further exacerbated when one reads through issues that are over a year old, saying that Spotify is still working on bringing public WebSocket APIs to third-party clients.

Additionally, though I will not go into detail, Spotify literally has WebSocket APIs that it uses for its web client. Why can't these APIs be made available to third-party users? They seem pretty data-rich to me, and stable enough to be deployed to your production software.

Moreover, I plead that the developers respond openly to this, whether WebSockets are coming or not, and not something opaque such as "the more time we spend on making sure people aren’t ‘investigating’ non-public APIs that they’re not authorised to access, the less time we can spend on making these APIs ready to be available to the public" (#817). This is not only unhelpful, but a childish response to a valid request. It was valid in 2018, and frankly, is even more valid in 2020.

Please, please release a public WebSocket API. Polling the API every few seconds is disgusting, wasteful for your servers and ours, and rate-limit prone.

Edit: x-posted to https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Access-to-websockets/m-p/4955299#M146

[jasongaunt]

Bump! We need this please!

Just closing previous tickets that request this without statement is not acceptable. If you won't do this, tell us please so we don't hang on a wire.

[JoaaoVerona]

I'm the author of #817 (which has been closed prematurely :smile:), and I can confirm that this is even more valid now in 2020 than 2018.

26 months later, my application has grown to the point it has 10k monthly users. This is a screenshot of the "Number of Requests/Endpoint" graph available on my application API dashboard:

There is, on average, 2 million requests per day to the /me/player endpoint. The second most-consumed endpoint is /playlists/ID/tracks, averaging ~80k requests per day. Roughly, less than 5% of the amount of requests targeted at /me/player.

Also, let's take these stats and keep in my mind that I only request the currently playing status of users active on my website, with a delay of 5 seconds (of which, is already cumbersome for some users).

The availability of a web-socket API -- allowing us, third-party developers, to fetch player updates from our users in real-time -- not only would improve the overall experience on our applications (instant updates, way less rate-limited calls due to high usage of the /me/player endpoint, etc), but I'm sure it would also reduce the overall load on Spotify servers.

[EricRabil]

Looks like they slipped this in last week: I'll open a thread on the forums and x-post it here

[jasongaunt]

@EricRabil and I have already replied to the new Spotify Developer forums thread, you can find that here;

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Access-to-websockets/td-p/4955299

Please can everyone else add some weight to it so they don't ignore this again?

/cc @BloodShura @EvanKaminsky @mohammedjammeh @Coding-Kiwi @raffjones @jeroenslor @lrholmes (too many to list)

[EricRabil]

Don't let the thread get buried – we deserve a response on this one, folks

[rolflocher]

@EricRabil Doesn't seem like this or any of the other Spotify repos are being maintained. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/What-is-going-on-with-the-ios-sdk-repo/m-p/4959837/