add Spotify and Pandora app UA

[van4oza]

Hi! please add Spotify app uas of this kind

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 13; SM-S908U) AppleWebkit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30 Spotify/888000599 (6; 2; 7)

And Pandora app uas like this

Pandora/2179 CFNetwork/1410.0.3 Darwin/22.6.0

[johnspurlock]

Thanks - Pandora updated

In what context does that Spotify UA present itself? Is that for episode download requests within the Spotify in-app browser itself?

[johnspurlock]

@van4oza, where/when does the spotify app send that user agent?

[van4oza]

I don't really know where it comes from. We are getting this UA as we are providing url prefixes for many podcast publishers at Podscribe. I just see A LOT of download requests from this UA, so we need to normalize it

[van4oza]

@johnspurlock
Probably its browser as it looks like like suffixed browser UA. But mb I'm wrong.

[johnspurlock]

It seems to be Android (in addition to "Linux", "Android" in the ua, SM-S908U is S22 ultra)

But I wasn't able to reproduce this user-agent from the Spotify app on Android, even when browsing around in show notes - links opened in Chrome - it's almost like the user is playing episodes from the browser within Spotify? I'd be skeptical if you're seeing a bunch of these.

Would really love to get to the bottom of where these are coming from. And if from Spotify on Android, how to get there.

[johnspurlock]

I've seen exactly zero of these across all shows using https://op3.dev which is why I'm interested in this!

[redimongo]

Could it be a spam bot? I checked our database, and could not find that user agent. However we found a few that said Spotify + Amazon IP addresses.

We know that Spotify uses Google data centres so we marked it as spam.

[knoxmic]

We have also seen this UA a few times. The referrer is always https://open.spotify.com/, but requests look like normal listeners.

┌────────delivered_at─┬─request_user_agent────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬─autonomous_system_organization────────────────────┐
│ 2022-08-18 09:11:52 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.5060.134 Spotify/1.1.91.824 Safari/537.36            │ M-net Telekommunikations GmbH                     │
│ 2023-03-06 16:33:47 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.5414.87 Spotify/1.2.6.863 Safari/537.36              │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-03-06 16:33:50 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.5414.87 Spotify/1.2.6.863 Safari/537.36              │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-03-27 10:07:10 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.5249.119 Spotify/1.2.3.1115 Safari/537.36            │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-03-27 10:07:11 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.5249.119 Spotify/1.2.3.1115 Safari/537.36            │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-03-27 10:07:11 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.5249.119 Spotify/1.2.3.1115 Safari/537.36            │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-03-27 10:07:11 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.5249.119 Spotify/1.2.3.1115 Safari/537.36            │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-03-27 10:07:11 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.5249.119 Spotify/1.2.3.1115 Safari/537.36            │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-03-27 10:07:21 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.5249.119 Spotify/1.2.3.1115 Safari/537.36            │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-03-27 10:07:25 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.5249.119 Spotify/1.2.3.1115 Safari/537.36            │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-03-27 10:07:31 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.5249.119 Spotify/1.2.3.1115 Safari/537.36            │ Vodafone GmbH                                     │
│ 2023-07-18 16:30:18 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/113.0.5672.128 Spotify/1.2.16.947 Safari/537.36 │ Telefonica Germany                                │
│ 2023-07-18 16:30:28 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/113.0.5672.128 Spotify/1.2.16.947 Safari/537.36 │ Telefonica Germany                                │
│ 2023-07-18 16:30:34 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/113.0.5672.128 Spotify/1.2.16.947 Safari/537.36 │ Telefonica Germany                                │
│ 2023-07-18 16:30:36 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/113.0.5672.128 Spotify/1.2.16.947 Safari/537.36 │ Telefonica Germany                                │
│ 2023-10-16 12:39:50 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.5845.190 Spotify/1.2.22.982 Safari/537.36       │ Telefonica Germany                                │
│ 2024-03-06 10:07:41 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.6167.184 Spotify/1.2.32.997 Safari/537.36 │ NetCologne Gesellschaft fur Telekommunikation mbH │
│ 2024-03-06 10:07:42 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.6167.184 Spotify/1.2.32.997 Safari/537.36 │ NetCologne Gesellschaft fur Telekommunikation mbH │
│ 2024-06-09 22:32:50 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.6367.119 Spotify/1.2.39.578 Safari/537.36 │ A1 Telekom Austria AG                             │
│ 2024-06-09 22:33:24 │ Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.6367.119 Spotify/1.2.39.578 Safari/537.36 │ A1 Telekom Austria AG                             │
└─────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

[redimongo]

here is the screenshot taking today from Spotify website

Note this is what my browser shows when I play one of our podcasts on Spotify.

[knoxmic]

Maybe this is a browser extension? Or this discontinued Car Thing 🧐

[jamescridland]

Web browsers can't set user-agents (for podcast audio). Without lots of CORS shenanigans anyway. Your screenshot shows a browser useragent, because that's what it is.

[johnspurlock]

It has to be an in-app browser inside the Spotify app. Anyone able to figure out how to launch it?

@knoxmic do you have a Car Thing? would love to do a test

[knoxmic]

Unfortunately, I don't own a Car Thing :(

But I was able to retrieve the user agent from the Spotify under Mac OS (desktop). In this case, simply via the share function and the iFrame apparently used on it.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.6422.112 Spotify/1.2.40.599 Safari/537.36

[johnspurlock]

Thanks, I was able to reproduce on Spotify for Mac. Episode -> ... -> Share -> Embed episode, then hit play button on the live preview in the popup.

Examples:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.6422.112 Spotify/1.2.42.290 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.6422.112 Spotify/1.2.40.599 Safari/537.36

Since these are coming from previews, they should probably not be considered listener-initiated plays, and not included in the existing Spotify user-agent opawg record.

I think the best thing to do here is to create a record for "Spotify embed preview" or something in bots.json, so they are excluded from inclusion in download calculations.

Note that the these Mozilla...Spotify/ UAs come from the preview popup only - once the iframe is embedded on a page, plays will be from a normal browser UA. And of course plays from the main desktop Spotify app itself look like Spotify/123900578 OSX_ARM64/0 (MacBookPro18,2)

I am curious about that initial UA reported way at the top of this issue, which is not the desktop app. SM-S908U = Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. I'm still not able to reproduce this on an Android phone, no way to get to the embed iframe share popup from what I can tell, only link/qr sharing

[jdefontes]

User agent examples from mobile devices:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU OS 16_3_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5355d Safari/8536.25 Spotify/888200607 (36; 2; 3)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 17_2_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5355d Safari/8536.25 Spotify/886200549 (36; 2; 3)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 14; SM-A536U) AppleWebkit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30 Spotify/891200599 (6; 2; 7)