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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

That’s very recent...and still no standalone Watch support at least as of April.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/iOS-iPhone-iPad/Apple-Watch...

Spotify’s Apple Watch app terrible because Spotify wants it’s that way. Other music streaming apps did build really good Apple Watch apps already[1].

I believe that Spotify just don’t want to integrate well with the system so that they can use it as a leverage.

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

That's because of iOS was never good at inter app communication (Android's version of intents) and that made Siri a worse experience for users and ultimately doomed it in the assistant wars.

I don't think Apple management sat down and thought, right, how do we kneecap competing music streaming providers? Okay lets build Apple Music support for Siri but not Spotify.

It was just that no iOS apps had deep Siri integration and they've been one-offing implementations for common usecases like timers, alarms etc. for the longest time. I assume someone got a project funded by the Music org to go one off the Apple Music usecase as well and here we are.

Someone just posted that Spotify does work with Siri on the iPhone and Siri on the watch uses the same system so that kind of throws the argument that Siri doesn’t support it out the Window.

Apple also has been adding third party intents for years.

With Shortcuts users can add their own Siri actions and third party apps can exposes programming actions.

Yes - the historical context was my point. Things are fine now, Spotify gets the same capabilities as Apple music, so there's no issue.

The thing they (Spotify) are complaining about now with the EU antitrust case is the 30% gate keeping toll Apple charges which is an entirely different thing.

Spotify doesn’t allow in app purchases. So Apple isn’t getting any cut.

Spotify complained that Apple wouldn’t allow them on the watch. But they still aren’t taking advantage of it even though Pandora has.

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