It’s the first week of August, meaning it’s time for us to name our winner and loser from the last week of tech news.
It’s been a relatively quiet week in tech with the biggest news being the launch of Nothing’s newest mid-range smartphone, the Nothing Phone (2a) Plus. Outside of this, Google has given Maps a series of helpful updates and YouTube has continued to crack down on ad-blockers.
Keep reading to learn all about our winner and loser this week.
Winner: Spotify
Our winner this week is Spotify as the music streaming service did a U-turn on its strategy to restrict lyrics for Free users.
It’s been a few months since Spotify announced that it would be capping the ability to view lyrics to just three songs monthly for those who utilise its free tier. Naturally, this move earned Spotify a large amount of backlash, with users particularly annoyed that the company was choosing to lock an existing feature behind a paywall instead of introducing a new perk to incentivise Premium users.
Thankfully, Spotify has listened to its users and has gone back on its decision to restrict lyrics for Free users – sort of.
“At Spotify, we’re always testing and iterating. This means availability of our features can vary across tiers and between markets and devices”, said a Spotify spokesperson (via Engadget). “Over the coming weeks, we’ll be expanding Lyrics availability for Spotify Free users so more people can enjoy viewing more lyrics, globally”.
The word “expanding” is particularly interesting here as it indicates that Spotify isn’t doing away with the limit altogether. However, the company did reassure 9to5Google that the new monthly limit is “higher than anyone would ever reach, and higher than any single user has even neared”. Challenge accepted.
Loser: X
Meanwhile, the X (formerly Twitter) app vanished from the macOS App Store, signalling another controversial decision from the social media platform since the Musk era began.
The change was spotted by @vedantapps on X, who tweeted “End of an era – the Twitter Mac app is no longer on the App Store”.
A quick search on the macOS App Store no longer brings up the Twitter for Mac app, while the browser link states that the app is not available.
It’s been a while since the app had received an update and it still held onto the blue Twitter branding, despite the platform having been renamed to X last July. MacOS also lost Tweetdeck a few years back, meaning Mac users will now need to open up their web browsers to access X.
The good news for those who have already downloaded the app is that many are reporting that they still have access. However, it looks like new Mac owners are out of luck.
