Spotify In App Integration Api

Player Beta These endpoints are in beta. While we encourage you to build with them, a situation may arise where we need to disable some or all of the functionality and/or change how they work without prior notice.

In this article, we’re sharing tips for connecting Spotify to your mobile iOS application. The guide is based on our web and mobile development experience and explores the stages of SDK connection: the process of login, token authentication, and the built-in Spotify player management.

Spotify offers an application programming interface (API) and a software development kit (SDK).

An API is a collection of routines, data structures, and classes designed specifically to interact with a piece of software. An SDK comprises of the API and tools for its management.

When creating an application, it’s better to use an SDK (if there’s one available), as it simplifies the development. Although the Spotify iOS SDK is in beta (ver. beta-25), it’s stable enough to use. Note that using Spotify’s SDK for commercial projects requires their team’s official written approval.

With Spotify integrated with your app, its users can receive user data, play audio and share public data. The latter includes sharing different Spotify items (albums, artists and playlists), and managing collaborative playlists. However, the ability is limited to public items only.

Spotify App Integration

Implementing the Spotify iOS SDK

For this article, we decided to show you the integration of Spotify’s iOS SDK with a mobile application for listening to music from several audio streaming services. Here, users can link to and undock their Spotify accounts, and log into several devices without re-connecting to the integrated services.

Keep in mind that although there is an official tutorial for implementing Spotify’s SDK, it can only introduce the basic functionality. The process of connecting the SDK to a real product is significantly different in terms of login logic and token management.

First things first, you need to create an XCode project, register a Spotify account and make it premium. It’s necessary for streaming. For those not sure it’s worth the purchase, there’s a free trial.

Registering your app in Spotify

Go to the Spotify’s Dashboard and log into your account. Find a Create an App button there. Enter your name and application description. Then examine the following fields:

Now find this button . Enter your name and app description. After this we are interested in the following fields:

Client ID - your app’s unique identifier, which is required for the SDK integration.
Client Secret - your app’s secret key, which is used on the server.
Redirect URL - a link returning to your application in case of login readdressing to the native app or Safari. Here, we used projectname://spotify/callback
Bundle ID - your app’s bundle ID.

Creating a SpotifyLoginController

We’re using a custom login, and not the one given in the tutorial because we need to receive a server authentication code.

First, let’s create a controller with UIWebView (go with the UIWebViewController if you wish; we prefer using UIViewController with an additional UIWebView; the delegate is self).

Then, we need to implement a basic Spotify initialization in viewDidLoad:

Here’s a closer look:

SPTAuthStreamingScope, SPTAuthPlaylistReadPrivateScope, SPTAuthPlaylistModifyPublicScope, and SPTAuthPlaylistModifyPrivateScope - are our app’s access rights
SpotifyRedirectURI is the redirect URL we specified in the Spotify app settings
SpotifyTokenSwapURL and SpotifyTokenRefreshURLb are something we’re going to discuss in a little while

When the controller appears in viewWillAppear, we need to initialize a login link:

Look at the following parameters:

client_id - is our app’s client ID
scope - is the access permission
redirect_uri - is a redirect URL that lets us return to the app and spot the completion of login
nosignup = true - disables automatic login
show_dialog = true - is a required “Is it really you?” user confirmation
response_type = code - is a type of returned value (you can get code or access token here - we’re interested in the former).

Here’s how the response is processed:

A successful login implementation results into a session, which is available through SPTAuth.defaultInstance().session. The peculiarity of Spotify’s sessions is the duration of their lifespan. At the time of writing, it’s 1 hour long. Once this period expires, you have to call the SPTAuth.defaultInstance().renewSession method.

Seemingly not an issue, you just have to add a SPTAuth.defaultInstance().session.isValid() method validation, but here’s a catch: all sessions are stored locally on devices.

Storing and updating tokens

If you want user to login to several devices without signing into their Spotify over and over again, you’re going to have to do the following:

Remember we mentioned SpotifyTokenSwapURL and SpotifyTokenRefreshURL? Those are links to the server requests that implement Spotify token updates. When updating a session, you need to fix the renewSession method:

We highly recommend that you reassign swap and refresh links before making any session updates. Otherwise, you might accidentally call renewSession in places, where SPTAuth.defaultInstance() hasn’t been configured yet.

Implement swap and refresh methods on the server. Here’s an example of this process in Ruby.
Once it has been working for an hour or so, call the renewSession method from your SDK, which then queries your server, gets the necessary data, creates a session and stores it on the device (again, locally).

Spotify Api Docs

With the following methods, the newly created session can be transformed into a string and back:

A transformed session can be stored either locally or on a server, but you need to encrypt it first.

Songs stream

Spotify SDK allows your app’s users to listen to entire songs without being redirected to the Spotify application.

Audio streaming is done not through the usual AVPlayer, but through the SPTAudioStreamingController. For this example, we saved a Spotify player item as a singleton in the Utils class, which makes it accessible from anywhere:

When launching our app (or once we have a connected Spotify account), we can call the player initialization: