- Some Spotify users reported to be unable to access music
- Regular app users were not affected; It’s a crash on ‘crack’ apps
- Users of broken apps are not prohibited
Many Spotify users have found themselves unable to access the service – and the reason seems to be the use of crack or otherwise unauthorized apps.
Some reports that Spotify was apparently down, began to circulate on March 3, but it turned out that the service was only not available to a very specific group of users: people using apps based on the very unofficial Spotify Premium APK.
Spotify Premium APK aims to give people access to some or all Spotify Premium features without being Spotify Premium subscribers (ie without paying for the music flow service) and it appears to have been blocked on March 3.
What’s going on?
Why some Spotify users find that their apps are not working
Techradar understands that the reported app problems are actually due to Spotify, which takes routine measures to enforce its terms and conditions that prohibit the use of cracked apps. And we also understand that no one who has used such apps will be hit by Ban Hammer: They are just knocked back to the free service.
Some places have suggested that APK’s sudden departure exposes users to risk: They say that if now-blocked users go for alternative ways of cheating the system, they may end up in the parts of app download sites where malware and scammers tend to gather. And that’s true, but of course it’s not Spotify’s problem.
What surprised me is how many people seem to prefer the risk of cracked apps just to keep up with a free Spotify-Sub, get Premium bundled with something else or just put their old-school pirate hats and download specific songs from the usual places.
And it has made me wonder: What is it that they value here if it is not the music? Would they still have a cracked app if Spotify offered the same premium features but the music was made by AI instead? I’m not sure I want to know the answer to it.
