14 DAY TRIAL // Spotify Ltd. has just announced the availability of a completely new iOS SDK for people looking to develop iOS applications containing Spotify functionality, like audio streaming, playlist manipulation, searching, and more. A beta is available for download immediately.
Dan writes on the Spotify Developer News blog that Spotify iOS SDK Beta is now officially available, replacing CocoaLibSpotify.
“The new API has been written from the ground up to be a fast, lightweight SDK for accessing Spotify services in your iOS App, including search, playlists, metadata lookup, audio playback and more,” according to Dan.
Some features are missing (when you compare the new Spotify SDK Beta to CocoaLibSpotify), but things won’t stay like this for long. The reason Spotify is deploying this beta onto developers in such a rushed state is to get feedback so they can work together with the developer community and shape up the SDK in a way that everyone likes.
“It’s common to want to start afresh with a project, but with an established API with lots of users, it’s not a decision to take lightly. Our concern with CocoaLibSpotify is the amount of CPU and RAM resources it can use, especially with users that have a large amount of playlists,” Dan explains.
Developers are told they will see signs of painstaking work put into reducing CocoaLibSpotify’s footprint, as well as evidence that CocoaLibSpotify’s APIs had to be changed significantly to achieve a lighter API.
“This is partly due to the underlying libspotify library, and partly due to the core design of CocoaLibSpotify — managing mutable objects, no ability to ‘unload’ metadata and playlists, internally marshalling a huge amount of calls between threads and so on does not a lightweight library make!” Dan explains.
“Once the decision to do this was made, it suddenly opened up a lot of possibilities — why not lose of our legacy code entirely and build on a modern, lightweight platform?”
Spotify cautions that, since the SDK was built from scratch, “there’ll be a break-in period while we stabilise things and fill in the functionality gaps, but we think releasing a beta publicly will help shape the new iOS SDK for the better,” the company says.
Interested parties will need Xcode 5 or higher and iOS 7 running on the iPhone / iPad / iPod touch. The project’s readme offers additional information on the SDK, a changelog, OAuth credentials, a getting-started guide, a tutorial for migrating from CocoaLibSpotify and, of course, a download link for the SDK itself.