WARNING: This is a beta release of the Spotify iOS SDK.

Spotify iOS SDK Readme

Welcome to Spotify iOS SDK! This ReadMe is for people who wish to develop iOS applications containing Spotify-related functionality, such as audio streaming, playlist manipulation, searching and more.

Usage of this SDK is bound under the Developer Terms of Use.

Beta Release Information

We're releasing this SDK early to gain feedback from the developer community about the future of our iOS SDKs. Please file feedback about missing issues or bugs over at our issue tracker, making sure you search for existing issues and adding your voice to those rather than duplicating.

For known issues and release notes, see the CHANGELOG.md file.

Requirements

The Spotify iOS SDK requires iOS a deployment target of iOS 7 or higher. The following architectures are supported: armv7, armv7s and arm64 for devices, and i386 and x86_64 for the iOS Simulator. The i386 and x86_64 slices cannot be used to build Mac applications.

Getting Started

Getting the Spotify iOS SDK into your application is easy:

1. Add the Spotify.framework library to your Xcode project.
2. Add the -ObjC flag to your project's Other Linker Flags build setting.
3. Add AVFoundation.framework to the "Link Binary With Libraries" build phase of your project.
4. #import <Spotify/Spotify.h> into your source files and away you go!

The library's headers are extensively documented, and it comes with an Xcode documentation set which can be indexed by Xcode itself and applications like Dash. This, along with the included demo projects, should give you everything you need to get going. The classes that'll get you started are:

• SPTAuth contains methods of authenticating users. See the "Basic Auth" demo project for a working example of this. Be sure to to read the "Authentication and Scopes" and "Session Lifetime" sections below, as authentication is quite involved.

  Note: To perform audio playback, you must request the SPTAuthStreamingScope scope when using SPTAuth. To do so, pass an array containing the constant to -loginURLForClientId:withRedirectURL:scopes:responseType:. The supplied demo projects already do this if needed.

• Metadata classes contain methods for doing corresponding metadata lookup. SPTUser is for userinfo, SPTSearch for searching. Take a look at the list of metadata classes

Authenticating and Scopes

You can generate your application's Client ID, Client Secret and define your callback URIs at the My Applications section of the Spotify Developer Website. The temporary keys given out for previous SDK Releases will not work with Beta 3 and newer.

When connecting a user to your app, you must provide the scopes your application needs to operate. A scope is a permission to access a certain part of a user's account, and if you don't ask for the scopes you need you will receive permission denied errors when trying to perform various tasks.

You do not need a scope to access non-user specific information, such as to perform searches, look up metadata, etc.

Common scopes include:

• SPTAuthStreamingScope allows music streaming for Premium users.

• SPTAuthUserReadPrivateScope allows access to a user's private information, such as full display name, user photo, etc.

• SPTAuthPlaylistReadScope and SPTAuthPlaylistReadPrivateScope allows access to a user's public and private playlists, respectively.

• SPTAuthPlaylistModifyScope and SPTAuthPlaylistModifyPrivateScope allows modification of a user's public and private playlists, respectively.

A full list of scopes is available in the documentation and in SPTAuth.h.

If your application's scope needs change after a user is connected to your app, you will need to throw out your stored credentials and re-authenticate the user with the new scopes.

Important: Only ask for the scopes your application needs. Requesting playlist access when your app doesn't use playlists, for example, is bad form.

Session Lifetime

Once your user is authenticated, you will receive an SPTSession object that allows you to perform authenticated requests. This session is only valid for a certain period of time, and must be refreshed.

You can find out if the session is still valid by calling the -isValid method on SPTSession, and the expiration date using the expirationDate property. Once the session is no longer valid, you can renew it using SPTAuth's -renewSession:withServiceEndpointAtURL:callback: method.

As an example, when your application is launched you'll want to restore your stored session then check if it's valid and renew it if necessary. Your code flow would go something like this:

SPTSession *session = …; // Restore session

if (session == nil) {
    // No session at all - use SPTAuth to ask the user
    // for access to their account.
    [self presentFirstTimeLoginToUser];

} else if ([session isValid]) {
    // Our session is valid - go straight to music playback.
    [self playMusicWithSession:session];

} else {
    // Session expired - we need to refresh it before continuing.
    // This process doesn't involve user interaction unless it fails.
    NSURL *refreshServiceEndpoint = …;
    [SPTAuth defaultInstance] renewSession:session 
                                   callback:^(NSError *error, SPTSession *session)
     {
          if (error == nil) {
                [self playMusicWithSession:session];
            } else {
                [self handleError:error];
            }
    }];
}

Beginner's tutorial

Please visit developer website for step-by-step through the creation of a simple app that uses the Spotify iOS SDK

Migrating from CocoaLibSpotify

CocoaLibSpotify is based on the libspotify library, which contains a lot of legacy and is a very complex library. While this provided a great deal of functionality, it could also eat up a large amount of RAM and CPU resources, which isn't ideal for mobile platforms.

The Spotify iOS SDK is based on a completely new technology stack that aims to avoid these problems while still providing a rich set of functionality. Due to this new architecture, we took the decision to start from scratch with the Spotify iOS SDK's API rather than trying to squeeze the new technology into CocoaLibSpotify's API. This has resulted in a library that's much easier to use and has a vastly smaller CPU and RAM footprint compared to CocoaLibSpotify.

The Spotify iOS API does not have 1:1 feature parity with CocoaLibSpotify. It contains functionality that CocoaLibSpotify does not, and CocoaLibSpotify has features that the Spotify iOS SDK does not. We're working to close that gap, and if there's a feature missing from the Spotify iOS SDK that's particularly important to you, please get in touch so we can prioritise correctly.

Due to the API and feature differences between CocoaLibSpotify and the Spotify iOS SDK, we understand that migration may be difficult. Due to this, CocoaLibSpotify will remain available for a reasonable amount of time after this SDK exits beta status.