I worked with a few people (tech) that Spotify later hired. Sweden is kind of small.
The calibre went from extremely high to surprisingly average within a decade. Not bad, to be clear, but kinda mid. I think they scaled too quickly and hit the 'bozo effect'.
What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client.
Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember being perplexed at how I could search and skip to any part of a song quicker than iTunes could looking at a local library. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous.
We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. Their traffic looked like it was initially seeded from their own (or CDN) servers (for best latency) and then overtime we would see some P2P traffic on the wire.
Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. I was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. I expect it fell to the pressures of a growing startup adding 100s of developers (without the skill of their original CTO/devs) where a native UI couldn't be updated and re-iterated as fast as a Web App. I wish they maintained 2 desktop clients, and left their native client alone to just be an audio player and push all their new social features to their new flagship CEF app.
It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. Seems the larger the organization the more likely they are to build new Web rendered Desktop Apps and we have to rely on unauthorized Indie efforts like this for fast, responsive native UIs.
(The comment is from a 2021 post about another Rust-based Spotify client.)
That sounds unusual for a free platform (not a limited trial but an actual free tier). Isn't it usually the case that only some small percentage can be convinced to pay?
Yeah, compared to AWS the lock-in effect is tiny. I'm sure there are highly prioritized plans to "improve" on this.
I guess they would need to control/"own" more of their customers data in proprietary formats. Not markdown/source code in English with agents running on customers' machines.
Jeff: please do better! :)
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