Basically looking for a dimmed down explanation on the title. You can have spotify playing on your phone connect to to a pc Xbox or playstation and the volume on your phone changes the volume on playstation and pc but not xbox. Whats behind jt?
In: Technology
It has to do with how someone makes their software and if they make a connection with exterior systems.
Through a connection (wired, internet, bluetooth etc.) devices have the possibilty to communicate. For simplification let’s say every application talks in its own language.
When you have the spotify application on your computer and on your phone, they can be connected and because they were made by the same developer they speak the same languague. That is why Phone Spotify can talk to Desktop Spotify.
The next part is whether or not you want your application to be able to talk to different applications. In this case the system itself to change the volume.
That is mostly done with API’s these days. An API (application programming interface) basically is both a dictionary and a body guard. It checks whether you are allowed to talk with each other. And if you are allowed, it gives you the instructions/translation like a dictionary. So if you say “Oui”, I’ll know it means “Yes”.
Getting access to an API often costs money. So it’s basically a business case for a company. Are we willing to spend money to use the API and willing to spend money on developers creating AND MAINTAINING this extra connection. Cause it’s not just about building it. When something changes (the change the grammar rules of their language for example), you have to change what you tell them to make sure it still works.
Whenever you open spotify it connects to their servers (duh – it has to stream audio). If it notices that you are also logged in on another device, then you get the option to send commands that spotify relays to the other device. I think spotify uses the central connections to broker setting up a direct local connection between the devices to lower latency, too.
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