Hacker News Reader

Comment by bthrn | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s more that the Apple Watch doesn’t support Spotify than the other way around. Apple prioritizes its own music service for the watch.

View on HN

Apple made an Apple Music app for the watch with support for offline playback. Spotify did not.

I believe for a year or so the Watch OS has supported the APIs Spotify would need to do offline playback, but they have not yet used them for whatever reason.

This was a controversial topic actually, Spotify openly accused Apple for not providing the access to Apple Watch SDKs when Apple Music was first launched. The APIs are made available after a while I think, but Spotify is still mad.

Spotifys accusation: https://timetoplayfair.com/the-case/

Response from Apple: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys-c...

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19377322

> I think it’s more that the Apple Watch doesn’t support Spotify than the other way around.

Since, watchOS 6 - that's pretty much not true

https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/29/pandora-shows-spotify-how-to-...

https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/09/watchos-6-spotify/

Other 3rd party apps can sync content for offline playback (eg. Overcast for podcasts) so I don't think there's any technical reason Spotify are not supporting it.

Does Overcast still support sync/offline playback from Apple Watch? I know it's been a bumpy feature that Marco has had trouble supporting due to API limitations and lack of demand/usage.

Yup. There was a version a few months ago that broke things but that got fixed after a few weeks.

I'm surprised to hear about the lack of usage though - Apple Watch support is the only reason I'm using Overcast.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com