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Comment by whopa | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they haven't just made a web client already, instead of bothering with fat native clients for every platform. The P2P stuff isn't really worth it given that bandwidth is so cheap, and they otherwise don't actually do anything with a native UI that a web based UI couldn't do.

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Because the web-client would suck compared.

And yes they do plenty with the native UI, it's just in the details. Those details that matter.

Do you some concrete examples of some of these details where being native makes it far and away better or easier than a web UI?

One thing that keeps amazing me about Spotify, is how there's seemingly zero latency when you jump to a new track. This is true for any track - even if you do a search query over the whole catalogue, then hit a random entry in the list of results, the music starts pretty much immediately.

This makes it much more pleasant to use than something like Grooveshark (Flash-based). I really don't see anyone pulling that off with a web client.

But RTMP was designed for this. This is totally possible using a web client.

Can you show me one place where it works?

I'd imaging it's the p2p streaming and the encryption that's also holding it back not just the UI. Plus I like having Spotify minimised.

The p2p streaming and encryption is overengineering for this problem. RTMPE works just fine for this.

Why would you want to depend on Adobe (or any other company) if you don't have to? You still have to implement your own technology if you want to be in mobile phones, set-top boxes etc. Spotifys cost of scaling is going to be relatively low with Debian, C++, Python, Vorbis, p2p etc.

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