Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
by neutronicus on Monday May 18, 2020 @07:31AM
(#23221060)
Most Spotify user-hours are probably office workers or students pumping music into headphones while working. If anything it's a productivity application because it trades flagrantly unnecessary resource usage (streaming the same songs over and over) for users' time (no more dicking around crafting the perfect iPod).
On the topic of flagrantly unnecessary resource usage...
My first child was born six months ago. Newborns (we discovered) sleep better with white noise. So of course we found a three hour white noise track on Spotify and played it from our phones for every nap, never bothering to download it.
Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
by kingosticks on Monday May 18, 2020 @11:45AM
(#23223872)
I find it hard to believe at least some of that that data wasn't cached on your device. Setting a track to be downloaded just means the cached data is evicted differently. If you run their desktop client with logging enabled you'll see this happening and I'd say it's likely to be the same across platforms. That is of course the actual reason they have a non-native app - to reuse the codebase and save money.
... articles with titles like:
“Slack in one Ruby statement” a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208431
More seriously though, Spotify and Slack are optimised to intentionally be huge time wasters, so it makes sense the organisations that produce them don’t care about performance / efficiency.