Do you use Spotify on older AV gear?

My just over 4 year old Pioneer SC-LX57 will be affected, not that I'll notice but most people don't replace expensive AV kit that often.  Perhaps smartphone apps just provide better interfaces and ease of use, but smartphones which also get obsoleted are also important to control/setup many devices these days.

I don't use Spotify either, but going to your comments, providing backwards compatibility is a major drag on innovation. An essential one, but a drag nevertheless. The key is to use industry-agreed APIs and build on top of those, but even then the designer is reliant on the degree of foresight and consensus that exists in the industry API.

The analogy that comes to my mind is mobile phone standards. The international standards evolve constantly, with "releases" every year or so. But when the standards move to a new "G", it's a reflection that the industry agreed that backward compatibility can no longer be sustained. So 3G handsets of whatever age will work at least as well as they used to on evolved 3G networks and 2G networks, but not on 4G networks. For them you need a 4G handset, that will also work on 3G and 2G networks (albeit by having multiple radio access circuits inside).

There is no doubt that having some of the critical circuitry in the control app, which is separate from the product itself, brings much greater potential for future-proofing than if it were all bespoke and set at the time of initial design. But the key to all this is still industry standards and that is why the new certifications for the new Unitis are so important and also why it's not trivial for Naim to decide to add in a new fashionable streaming service that has cut a new path, however popular it may appear to be.

best

David

Good points David, but one issue that's concerned me from a different perspective is what happens when the AV equipment manufacturer fails to update their control app to allow continuing functionality with the current mobile OS.

To take my Pioneer example further, the AV amp would be considerably more difficult to configure and some features unavailable if I tried to do so via the front panel alone - I don't think a 3-4 year support time frame is good enough for such devices (blame Apple for the trend?) as you'd almost be expected to keep contemporary smartphones/tablets simply to control the devices you bought around the same time.