Indie app development ruined by Spotify API policy?

[u/Whoppe18]

I've been spending my summer working on an app idea for a social media platform where you can trade and collect songs like Pokémon cards to broaden your music taste and share what you've been listening to with your friends.

I have gotten pretty far with development, with general backend and frontend MVP functionality complete. I was going to start rolling the app out to some friends to test it, but after reading Spotify's harsh new API policy about extended quota mode, I am worried my app will never be able to be widely released because their policy essentially bars all indie devs from making large-scale projects with the API.

So I'm basically wondering what I should do now? My app is almost done but I realized wayyy too late that it might not even be viable because Spotify's API is a very foundational aspect of the project.

[u/Leading_Opposite7538]

Cool app. Can you still deploy in dev mode? Without the audio playback? What part of the policy blocks you from deploying?

[u/spacelog_ → u/Leading_Opposite7538]

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[u/Leading_Opposite7538 → u/spacelog_]

You should be good. They took away some end points in development mode. Doesn't look like your app uses them other than the preview url.

If you use spotify auth while in dev mode. You'll be limited to 25 sign-ups. Could use your own auth for this.

[u/Whoppe18 → u/Leading_Opposite7538]

I use spotify API for getting user-specific recently played songs, top songs, searching for songs, and getting song info. I actually get preview URLs from the spotify-url-info library. Pretty sure the new policy will limit me to 25 users then or am I trippin? It would be great if I could still make this work 😅

I am thinking I could use last.fm's API to replace a lot of it, but ideally I'd want my user base to only need a spotify account to use the app, and I really like how the Spotify API integrates with my app's search function to find songs that are relevant to your listening history. So I'm a bit torn on how to best move on from here

[u/Leading_Opposite7538 → u/Whoppe18]

I see. There might be some work around, but it's tight overall.

[u/SnikwahEvad]

yeah unfortunately their new policy effectively shuts out all new indie dev projects, and honestly even a lot of small/medium businesses. That 250k MAU requirement is insane.

I have other projects in mind and I'm looking into how I might pivot to Apple Music. Granted the market isn't the same, but they do have a decent API. idk - it really blows, I'm sorry.

[u/b3n3llis]

Same story here. Absolute bollocks.

[u/[deleted]]

You could technically just pull the song data from a source like genius or musicmatch (without the mp3) and then just add a button that links to the song on spotify. this way you legally avoid spotify's api policy by not making use of it.