- Some Spotify users reported being unable to access music
- Regular app users weren’t affected; it’s a crackdown on ‘cracked’ apps
- Users of cracked apps aren’t being banned
Many Spotify users have found themselves unable to access the service – and the reason appears to be the use of cracked or otherwise unauthorized apps.
Some reports of Spotify apparently being down started to circulate on the 3rd of March, but it turned out that the service was only unavailable to a very specific group of users: people using apps based on the highly unofficial Spotify Premium APK.
The Spotify Premium APK aims to enable people to access some or all of the Spotify Premium features without being Spotify Premium subscribers (ie, without paying for the music streaming service), and it appears to have been blocked on 3 March.
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What’s going on?
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TechRadar understands that the reported app problems are indeed due to Spotify taking routine measures to enforce its terms and conditions, which prohibit the use of cracked apps. And we also understand that nobody who’s been using such apps is going to be hit with the ban hammer: they’ll just be knocked back to the free service.
Some sites have suggested that the abrupt demise of the APK exposes users to risk: they say that if now-blocked users go looking for alternative ways to cheat the system, they could end up in the parts of app download websites where malware and fraudsters tend to congregate. And that’s true, but of course that’s not Spotify’s problem.
What’s surprised me is how many people seem to prefer the risk of cracked apps to just sticking with a free Spotify sub, getting Premium bundled with something else or just putting on their old-school pirate hats and downloading specific songs from the usual places.
And that’s got me wondering: what it is that they value here if it isn’t the music? Would they still want a cracked app if Spotify offered the same Premium features but the music were made by AI instead? I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that one.
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