~2% Safari for Mac usage is global. Spotify is doing business in 60 countries. Most of the markets are developed (no China, India or Russia) and tend to have more Mac/Safari users.

It's still not very high though. I work on a product that supports Safari and we have like 4% usage. However, last time we introduced a bug that broke it completely (by accident), no one said anything for like, 2 months (it's a SaaS, but we still have hundreds of thousands of daily users).

Turns out not only do we have very few Safari users, people are so used to Safari breaking on shit (not just ours!) they just switch to Chrome for specific tasks out of habit instead of filing issues.

Safari is the somewhat inconvenient but built in browser Mac users use to save their battery life and not much else.

Oddly enough I went back to using Safari on MacOS. Battery life was big reason. The other was safari has been the only browser I can get to successfully stop playing video ads.

People are not used to Safari breaking regularly, that's absurd. But it's probably easier for them to run a second browser to work around broken sites than it is to figure out how to complain to the site. And having your site be broken reflects badly on you, not on Safari.

Safari's JS support is pretty good, but CSS is wonky and various other things (like how cookies are handled) are different than all the other major browsers. So it will break on shit devs may not expect. Obviously that's the fault of the devs (IE10/11 are worse, but we make stuff work there too!), no argument there.

But it is becoming a pretty niche browser, and yes, it DOES break a lot of stuff. No, it's not broken on Facebook or your favorite news site, but every time I bring it out for a test drive I find a couple of broken things in various smaller web apps that work everywhere else.

So while I don't think it should be that way, it tends to be a pretty brittle experience.

I work on desktop and switched to Safari because Chrome is bloated and slow. Also Safari's tabs UX is much better.

Opening Chrome once a week because some site works only in Chrome is really easier than bothering to file tickets.

I don't find Safari inconvenient at all. Its UI is lean, the default key bindings are nice, and with sVim it's even better.

When we say 2%, are we talking about 200 million users world wide and 15 million in the U.S alone? It's worth putting an engineer to fix the codec, IMO. I think it's more of a strategic move over a technical choice in the view of Safari new ad control.

2% of what makes 200millions? Am I missing anything?

Yes, but how many of those users use Spotify in the browser instead of using the app?

>Desktop Safari usage is ~2%[1], so I'd imagine this is an attempt by Spotify to flex some muscle. Since usage is so small, Spotify has the power.

What if Apple also "flexed some muscle" and dropped the iOS Spotify app from the App Store?

It would only result in bad PR for both companies, considering it's a service used by 140M people, with 60M paying for it (https://press.spotify.com/us/about/)

Also, since the app doesn't violate any ToS, I'm not sure if there's any ground for removal (I doubt they can just pull it for no reason without risking a lawsuit)

The ToS is vague enough that they could. Besides it compete's with Apple's own Apple Music, and duplicate core functionality has been a reason to oust apps in the past.