Spoticast Is Removed From The Play Store For Violating Intellectual Property And App Impersonation

Spotify still doesn’t support streaming its music to Chromecast. That’s bad. The third-party Spoticast app allows you to stream Spotify audio to Chromecast for free. That’s good. Spoticast has been taken off the Play Store, allegedly for violating intellectual property rights and “app impersonation.” That’s bad. Want some frozen yogurt?

This sort of thing isn’t uncommon, but it is a little unexpected in this case – adding functionality to Spotify shouldn’t technically violate any of the agreements between the streaming service and the music labels. It’s more likely that someone got upset that the app is called “Spoticast,” which is probably why Google slapped the app impersonation sticker on it. According to the developer, no one at Spotify made any complaints against the app – perhaps some confused Play Store users downloaded it by mistake, couldn’t access their Beyonce, and tipped Google with complaints.

  

The developer could probably publish Spoticast with a different name, but before that, they’re going to try to get explicit permission from Spotify to re-post the app. We’ll see what happens – hopefully Spotify will wake up and add the official functionality soon, so this sort of work-around won’t be necessary.

Source: Google+