Roughly 6 months ago I had a chat on IRC with some Spotify engineers about a pending replacement library for libspotify, which I understood is deprecated and no longer developed. Essentially it was said that work was being done on a small POSIX-style native library just for the audio playback portion of the Spotify playback, with the Web API intended to handle every other aspect. I got the impression that the intention was to make this library as small and portable as possible, hence it would work on most platforms, including desktop.
I have not heard any more of this, and I can not find any sources that detail plans to replace libspotify. Besides being fairly buggy, outdated and somewhat painful to use, the current issue I see with libspotify is that it uses a different method of authentication from the Web API, making it awkward to mix data and functionality between these two sources.
Could someone from Spotify please elaborate on whether or not this small native library is at all in development, and whether there are any plans to release it, or at least something that would fill the same role?
(I am a developer at Spotify, but I don't work on this part of our software specifically)
Yes, the small native player library will eventually be shipped for desktop platforms. We are already shipping it for Android and iOS, but those SDKs also have platform bindings so it's not obvious that they are actually using the same library which will eventually replace libspotify.
In the meantime, the Web API has been growing at a steady pace and provides much of the non-playback functionality that libspotify used to provide. At any rate, the replacement library is very much in active development. Last I heard, they are still working to release it for desktop platforms, but I do not know exactly when, since I am not working on the team that handles this code.