I know that libspotify will no longer get any support and is replaced by webapis. I do not have any problems with this because libspotify usability is just bad and there are a lot of unfixed bug as well as lots of missing features. However, there is no way to get any stream URL or have a small library for stream decoding.
We are promised that a new small replacement library will be available "soon" for more almost 4 years now and parts of libspotify are already shutdown. In addition to this since some time, there is a note that libspotify will be shut down in 2017.
I don't care about anything that is provided by the web API, which is clearly superior to libspotify in almost any regard. All I care about is a simple player API, where I can input a Spotify track URI and get raw PCM frames out (which can be output to speakers, streamed to non-supported devices, etc).
You already have this type of library inside the android SDK, which provides all we need. What is the reason for not providing a standard c library for non-android platforms (win32, Linux, mac)?
Or provide a way to get an RTMP or HTTP stream URL, the way it's done in Spotify webplayer, which would be even better.
I really like Spotify and hope to be able to continue developing apps that use it.