They also deprecated their library (libspotify) which had previously been used to build alternative third-party clients and playback-capable integrations for paying Spotify users. They promised a replacement, but that never happened… the best we ever got was a set of watered down APIs that’s curiously missing what one would need to build a third party client.

They couldn’t allow for users to opt out of the constant A/B testing and user herding in the ever-changing official client by using a sane third-party client that just acts like a normal music player and obeys the user’s preferences. The ability to shove the music that’s most profitable and whatever other non-relevant audio content in users’ faces by mandating official client use is too valuable to give up.

Somehow even Apple is better on this front, with there being multiple alternative Apple Music clients out there that are build with official Apple SDKs and aren’t reverse engineered, which is crazy. They’ve out-Apple’d Apple.