Nah it’s not. Most big tech companies optimize for having multiple devs be able to work simultaneously on different projects, which usually is orthogonal to build time (lots of potentially redundant code, lots of libraries that are split up). Is it slow for a single dev project? 100%, but it’s pretty reasonable for a larger company. Last I heard FB’s app took like 30+ minutes to cold start build.

Disclosure: Work on mobile infrastructure at Spotify.

A lot of the Spotify app isn't perhaps visible at a first glance. Besides the key features I'm sure you're already familiar with, there is also an extensive number of 3rd party integrations (cars, wearables, voice, social sharing etc).

The app as a whole is 1-2M LOC Objective-C & Swift.

That’s an unfathomably long time for an application of the complexity of Spotify.

No it’s not, and the Spotify app is clearly fairly complex.

What do you know about the complexity of the Spotify app?

It's a music player and not even a good one.

Is it really just a music player? All it does is fetch some binary blob in some audio format and play it?

I feel this is another Dropbox moment [1] on Hacker News where the hyper-smart ones here dismiss a whole technology/company on their most simplistic assumptions about what the product actually is doing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

There are hundreds of screens in the Spotify app

What you're saying has nothing to do with the complexity of their app.