How We Built It: Spotify Lite, One Year Later

This post details the engineering challenges and solutions involved in building Spotify Lite, a separate, smaller version of the Spotify app for users with constrained resources. Key contributions include: building a new app from scratch with a different playback stack for minimal memory and network usage; implementing extensive binary size reduction techniques (e.g., using the lld linker, link time code optimizations, R8 shrinking, App Bundles, stripping unused translations); allowing users to store app and cache/downloads on SD cards; and generalizing backend services to identify and serve different Spotify apps (Lite, Kids, Stations, Android Automotive). The post also highlights the iterative process of balancing feature additions with maintaining a small app size and the introduction of continuous delivery pipeline checks for size bloat.