Spotify does not care and will not fix this unless there is a major outcry. They've been ignoring user complaints since "1.0" dropped quite a while ago. They don't even post changelogs anymore. Features are added one day and disappear the next. It took months for them to reintroduce CTRL-F. They don't care.
If another platform had the cross-device operability and catalog, I'd switch immediately.
They probably won't even fix it if there is an outcry. Their software is pretty bad. Back when I had an android phone (galaxy S5), their app would constantly crash on me multiple times per day.
Unfortunately their competition is not so great. Apple music has the worst UX I have ever experienced. I tried google music when it first came out but I liked spotify's catalog and ability to share playlists better at the time. And finally, there is Tidal which I haven't tried but I have heard it's not that good.
4 big competing streaming services and they all have glaring issues/missing features and yet seem to not be doing anything about it...
I've been using Google Play Music since it launched, and I'm very happy with the service. It works very well on web/Android/iOS, and there's rarely anything that I find missing from its catalog. And, for the rare times that I do, Google Play Music comes with YouTube Red, which gives you ad-free playback and offline caching.
Pandora is said to be working on a competing service to launch next year. They bought what was left of rdio, so I'm expecting the client won't be as generally bad as Spotify's.
After seeing this post today I made a script to install a Electron wrapper for the Spotify web client so that you can still have the "dedicated desktop app" feel/behavior without the SSD-killing part! https://jamesmcintyre.github.io/spotify-electron-client/
I'm a heavy Spotify user and my Intel 330 SSD just died catastrophically and I am just about to install a brand new Samsung Evo today. This is definitely concerning, especially the lack of communication from Spotify on the matter.
Who is the CTO and what does he say about it so far?
Without a qualified representative making a statement, it simply looks like a case of either poor engineering or pith-poor engineering, difficult to be sure which.
Definitely the type of defect that needs to be corrected in soft-wares before they can actually become worth money.
I used perfmon and procmon and saw the Spotify process was writing to a file in my temp folder named etilqs_{random string}. The first part of the name is SQLite in reverse. This was on Windows. I also noticed three other etilqs files but they were owned by the Google Chrome process.
My spotify is showing 168.23 GB written and 1.45GB read. Meanwhile, chrome has only written 51.27 GB and read 6.03 GB. This is also on my home computer where I rarely listen to music (usually I listen on my work computer or phone).
I've been listening for a few hours now, just checked AM and saw 44GB on disk, but oddly for Network, it has only received 176MB. Where is all the data coming from then?
If another platform had the cross-device operability and catalog, I'd switch immediately.