Says who? I respectfully submit you’re making some unwarranted assumptions. Even if Spotify were to eventually offer higher res streaming than it does now, do you genuinely envision it displacing all other streaming options, let alone management of local storage? Do you think Tidal has shown any especial competence as a universal music manager/controller? How do you see or define the “Connect” option as the “most comfortable for everyone”?
I’m not a huge Spotify fan. I ditched Tidal, and kept Qobuz. I occasionally will look for music on Spotify if someone recommends it to me, or I am intrigued by a review and I cannot find it elsewhere, but I could not care less about other people’s playlists (which apparently is a huge selling feature for some), and I meet my travel music needs differently. I don’t find its search/recommendation capabilities superior to Roon, though its fans insist they are. Still, I know a lot of folks love it. And as Darko says, 320kbps is better than 0kbps. But I also know there are many non-Spotify users, just as there are many on-Apple, non-Android, non-Roon, non-Minim, etc. users. Why should you want to force all of those users to have only one way to connect their music streams to their devices? And why should you want the service whose DNA is low-res to be that monolith?
What will such users do for local storage control? Last time I checked, Spotify does not support any of the file formats that full-res/hi-res files require. This could change in the future, no doubt. But for now and the foreseeable future, people who purchase dCS-level equipment are not likely to see Spotify as much more than a music exploration service of convenience.
Remember, it’s Spotify that refused to work with Roon. I understand Spotify wanting to control and manage their user relationship and data, and I get that. That’s their biz model: monetizing their customers. But had Spotify not so refused, we might have a wonderful integrated ecosystem for the high, mid, and low end. Now, I completely understand that Spotify is an independent business with its own plans, goals, and aspirations. It has no obligation to make nice with Roon or anybody else. So, this is mostly fanciful rumination, but in my view, it’s Spotify that has walled itself off from better integration, not dCS, and not Roon. And they’ve done so primarily because their biz model leverages their customer relationship in a social media type of way. I am less comfortable with that.
One thing missing from all these “Connect” options is the ability to have detailed interaction with the hardware, and make firmware/software changes in the components themselves. I don’t use Mosaic much, but I do use it almost daily to control the screen of my DAC and Upsampler, and to interact with the Clock modes, upsampling, filters, etc. Unless you plan to have Spotify (or Tidal or whoever) do all that—and I don’t see the manufacturers allowing that—you’re not going to get rid of individual manufacturer control apps. But hey, it’s good to have dreams!
P.S. As a long-time Lumin owner/fan, I loved reading Gregg’s account. Fascinating and amusing. I had no idea. I do think Lumin did the software side pretty well, but not well enough to be a software market leader. For an example of just how hard this is, and just how messy the sausage-making can be, head over to PS Audio for an historical look at their cratered eLyric software and their travails developing their Octave server and client. This really is hard, expensive work.