Shazam removed all 3rd party SDKs from its iPhone app | Hacker News Reader

Shazam removed all 3rd party SDKs from its iPhone app

blog.appfigures.com

93 pointsarielm30 comments

There is Soundhound but I've found it's accuracy is not quite as good. But the app is a little cooler and it writes a playlist of queries to Spotify.

After Apple integrated with Siri, I discovered a nice, somewhat hidden feature which is open iTunes Store >> Hamburger Menu >> Siri to find a preserved history of my "what song is this?" queries. Even in loud environments I find asking my phone to tell me what song it is works well and is a little easier than opening an app.

shazam also seamlessly creates a spotify playlist with your queries.

Since my Shazam accuracy is also terrible, I'll give it a try. I was at a show this weekend and Shazam couldn't find musics played from its own author. In my experience it just work well when matching an official recording. Maybe it is better for anglo-american music.

AFAIK, Shazam (and other audio fingerprinting stuff, like youtube's copyright analysis) works on some very precise timings of volume peaks & tones. I wouldn't expect it to properly identify a live performance.

Shazam isn't designed to work with live music at all. It recognizes specific recordings.

Midomi works on the browser, can't beat that.

https://www.midomi.com/

> ... and it writes a playlist of queries to Spotify.

Shazam can also integrate with Spotify. I'm doing this presently on Android

That’s great news! I don’t understanding why they cant be bothered to put this in the version log, instead of the useless ‘bug fixes and performance improvements’ note.

I just wish they hadn't removed integration with other music players which aren't Apple Music.

Almost done. They increased the UI friction for other services. Now you must make multiple clicks to open non Apple Music. You can't configure a standard service.

Apple Music certainly has the most screen real estate now, but I was still able to find the "Open in Deezer" within a freshly updated Shazam.

This is really annoying now. I was fine with having to do 2 clicks but making it inconvenient for me to open songs in my streaming service of choice is a pretty good way to never have me try the apple music service.

Good luck removing that Firebase integration on Android

Makes sense, now that Apple owns them.

>Right now, the app only has one 3rd party SDK installed and that’s HockeyApp. Microsoft’s version of TestFlight. It’s unclear why it’s still there, but we don’t expect it to stick around for too long.

Because the current build & test pipeline uses it and it takes time to make non-breaking changes?

>On Android, Apple seems to be ok with leaking usage data...

Or, the Android team is lagging a bit ... in a company whose focus is iOS.

Or Apple knows that Android users (other than LineageOS et al) do not care one whit about their privacy.

So Apple removed Facebook login capabilities or they just used the web-based login instead? I did this with a native iOS application before, just used the web-based login while checking for the completion hook and it was about the same experience as using all of Facebook's native SDK's while keeping the app size down and very little possibility for snooping on FB's side.

It’s too bad there’s no way to do this to all software on a phone.

You can use a DNS like AdGuard to block most of the requests on iOS

I wish the article did a before and after comparison of the Shazam .ipa file size. Anyone know these figures?

I'm sure there are better sources than what I could find just now, anyway:

Today version 12.8 is 100.3MB [0]. The latest snapshot from The Internet Archive is version 11.10.0 and it is 107.6MB [1]

[0]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shazam/id284993459 [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180614175700/https://itunes.ap...

Ad SDKs have gotten much better about size. We show a decrease of roughly 5MB after the change. The real "hit" comes in the form of battery and network usage.

> Right now, the app only has one 3rd party SDK installed and that’s HockeyApp. Microsoft’s version of TestFlight. It’s unclear why it’s still there

HockeyApp also provides crash reporting (it uses the PLCrashReporter framework to do so), so that may be why it's still there.

I wish there were some public data on the impact of removing those - app start latency, battery consumption, bandwidth, etc. I bet there are positive impacts for the customers other than just privacy.

Makes sense to keep the hockeyApp integration as it is an amazing tool for crash analysis and they still need that. Integration with crash analytic is a different type of integration than facebook, advertisment and the other stuff (crap) they have removed.

Although Google has purchased Crashlytics, so now one of the most popular crash reporting tools has Google Analytics as a dependency (and yes, it takes several explicit steps to turn off the default data-gathering that is unrelated to crashes)

Apple's crash reports are pretty good as well, they'll pop you right into the offending part of the code. But it doesn't have all of the fancy dashboards and such.

You really don't need that with Apples native stuff.

I get crashes from my costumers and I can see where in code it crashed, it just integrates with Xcode and it's like a local crash.

You cannot rely on that all users are reporting crashes. They might choose to uninstall your application instead. You need some kind of automated reporting in everything that is critical to you.

Apple crash reporting system is automated.

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