It wasn’t long ago that we showed you a jailbreak tweak called Lightify, which applied a light skin to the Spotify Music app’s typically dark UI. On the other hand, a new free jailbreak tweak called Brightify by iOS developer cyanisaac aims to accomplish similar goals, all while coming with its own unique benefits that competing tweaks don’t offer. Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs. Spotify is all the music you’ll ever need. Listening is everything - Spotify.
Spotify’s dark design is very much its identity. No matter the platform you use it on, the dark theme is there staring back at you.
Until now.
A bunch of ace websites, blogs and people I follow have spent the past 24 hours waxing lyrical over a new Spotify skin called Spotio.
Spotify App Skin
As an avid Spotify listener myself (although only on the free tier, cos I ain’t made of money) I couldn’t not check it out.
So I did, but with my fingers tightly crossed that Linux support was on offer…
Spotio is a light theme for Spotify’s desktop app
Spotio is the work of Devin Halladay, who was inspired to create the lighter, airier theme for Spotify after the (sorely missed) Rdio closed.
“If you decided to go with Spotify after Rdio was bought but, like me, you miss Rdio’s light UI, you’re in luck—I discovered that you can skin the Spotify app with CSS,” Devin writes on the Github project.
Devon’s nifty hack reskins Spotify in a somewhat similar way to the Ubuntu Spotify skin we featured way back in history.
The “bad news” is that Spotio is currently only available for macOS, with the app being re-packaged and distributed with the new theme assets included.
The “good news” is that Linux support is coming. An installer is hopefully going to be ready to download over the weekend.
We’ll update this article as soon as we know the Linux build is out, but in the meantime you can learn more (and even download Spotio if you’re on macOS) at Devin’s website, or get involved in hurrying along the Linux build by contributing to the project on GitHub.
Why?
I sorely miss Rdio. It was the perfect music streaming service: quality streaming, massive selection, perfect UX, beautiful UI, and wonderful social interaction features. When it was bought by Pandora, many of us were left out in the dust and were forced to choose between lesser services like Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
Spotify Windows App Skin
I know this little theme can't recreate the amazing product that Rdio was, but I'm really glad that I found a small way to pay tribute to Rdio's product and UI in my own way. This isn't perfect, it isn't Rdio, but as of now it's the closest we're going to get.
Spotify App Skins
If you decided to go with Spotify but, like me, you miss Rdio's light UI, you're in luck—I discovered that you can skin the Spotify app with CSS.
Disclaimer: I have nothing but respect for the Spotify design and engineering teams, and undertaking this project has served only to increase that respect. They're really, really brilliant teams doing things that I admire greatly. I appreciate the design decisions they made while designing the app, but I prefer a light theme in my apps, so this project is merely an attempt to my visual preferences and to relive the memory of Rdio, not to do it 'better' than the Spotify team did.