4 Cons of Using Spotify’s Web App

You know the phrase: “There’s an app for that?” » Well, that couldn’t be more true these days. It seems like almost every company wants you to use their app, from social sites like X and Reddit to music streaming services like Spotify. Sure, Spotify is nice enough to offer a web player that works in your browser, but like social sites that limit browser usage in order to push users to their apps, Spotify also does this by limiting the functionality of its web player, even for paying subscribers – one of the few uncomfortable truths about using Spotify.

In fact, Spotify’s web app has several drawbacks, including lack of access to Premium’s 24-bit FLAC streaming, lack of offline use, lack of local file integration, and lack of advanced playback features. Conversely, desktop and mobile apps offer all of this, but they also take up storage space on your device and can access data you might not want to share. So it’s understandable that some subscribers might want to avoid using the Spotify app, but this unfortunately comes at the cost of functionality, given how limited Spotify’s web app is no matter what browser you’re using.

While these omissions may not matter to everyone, especially when maximum audio quality requires high-end headphones and dedicated DACs to really shine, the limitations are clear. On the other hand, the simple portability of listening in a browser tab may be worth it. Still, these web app limitations are definitely worth considering so you can decide if ditching native apps is worth the tradeoff.

This is probably the most egregious example of locking features behind the official Spotify app, as it even blocks paid Premium subscribers. Audio in the web app is limited to 128 kbps for free users, and Premium is locked to 256 kbps, which could ruin your sound quality on Spotify. You don’t even get 320 kbps, which is basically an industry standard at this point, unless you use an official Spotify app, which goes even further with studio-quality FLAC support.

The web app doesn’t have the audio quality setting you’ll find in the main apps, and Spotify doesn’t even tell you in the web app what quality you’re getting – perhaps that information is hidden in the UI since it tops out at a modest 256 kbps, even for paid subscribers. The web application is in a worse situation because of this limitation, not only because of the lower quality of the streams, but also because most users don’t even realize it unless they have the ability to identify low-bitrate streams with high-end equipment.

Since one of the main benefits of Spotify’s Premium membership is that you can stream high-quality FLAC files rather than compressed AAC files, it’s a bit ironic that the most accessible means of listening – the web app – can’t play them. This isn’t a browser limitation either – all the major players support FLAC playback in their own right – so it’s a design issue unique to Spotify.

If you’ve ever used the desktop or mobile apps for Spotify, you may have noticed that you can save songs and albums for offline use, which is useful for those times when you don’t have a consistent internet connection for streaming but still want your music. Unfortunately, if you’re using the web version, this feature is completely missing: there’s no way to use Spotify’s web app offline.

While it’s more likely that you’ll want offline music for the mobile app, there are rare cases where offline use in a browser might be useful, such as when traveling on a train with a spotty internet connection. Since the official desktop app is simply the site in a Chromium wrapper (using the Chromium Embedded Framework, similar to apps like Steam), the only real reason offline support can’t work in a browser is probably related to DRM limitations.

Ultimately, forcing users to always use their data when streaming with the web app isn’t very practical, especially if they have limited data on a mobile hotspot that the web app is going to leverage. Worse, Chromium and its derivatives support PWAs (and support is currently being tested for Firefox), which means that all Blink-based browsers (as in the vast majority) are fully capable of caching a large amount of data specifically for offline use. So it’s not the browsers that are the problem here: it’s Spotify and DRM that impose an artificial limitation which, ultimately, is annoying for users.

Spotify’s library may be incredibly vast, but thanks to licensing deals, there are gaps in the collection. That’s where local file integration comes in: you can add your own MP3, M4A, and WAV files to desktop and mobile apps. However, this feature is entirely missing from the web app, meaning you can’t fill in the gaps in the library like you can with the main apps. Again, this is the case for both free and paid customers using the web app – and it’s another feature that’s arbitrarily missing, as web browsers easily support local media downloads, caching, and playback.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a paying subscriber who has gone out of your way to download the missing tracks and add them to your favorite albums and playlists. These tracks will essentially be cut off when you attempt to listen through the web app, as all your manual downloads will be grayed out and ignored. While you can grab these tracks on a separate device running the desktop or mobile app, the whole system is quite clunky and requires files to always remain local. This means that if you’ve added tracks to your desktop, your phone needs its own copies of those files to play them. Still, the failing web app is a limitation of Spotify’s own implementation, perhaps intended to push users out of their browsers and toward mobile and desktop apps. After all, most browsers offer an API for file access, so they probably aren’t to blame for the problem.

If you are the kind of music listener who likes to enhance their experience with features like software equalizers (EQ), crossfading tracks, and gapless playback, you may want to avoid the web player which lacks all these advanced features. Options that are easy to find in the mobile and desktop app settings are missing from the web app, which can negatively affect your tunes. Let’s say you listen to many live albums where the tracks flow together without any audible gaps: the web app will always leave gaps between these tracks because the setting to remove them is missing. This is doubly true if you rely on an equalizer to ensure the best sound, as there isn’t one in the web app although the feature is one of the cool things you didn’t know Spotify could do. With the web app, users are left with a flat EQ unless they take matters into their own hands to find a software EQ, which complicates the experience.

All of the social media integration you’ll find in the mobile and desktop apps is also missing from the web app, which can be a positive or a negative, depending on how social you like while listening to music. On the one hand, thanks to these missing features, the web app’s UI is less cumbersome – but on the other hand, especially if you’re a paying customer, the minimum viable web app experience can not only feel limiting, but also exploitative, as you’re pushed toward apps that contain every feature Spotify advertises. Either way, the lack of advanced playback features is definitely a downside of using Spotify’s web player.