It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. 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. 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 was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. 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. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous. 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.

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.įew 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.

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