Spotify might bring back a feature everyone loved till 2018 (APK teardown)

Spotify has been steadily transforming from a pure music-streaming service into a social media platform. Last year, the company introduced in-app Messages, and just yesterday, it quietly expanded that feature with group messaging support. Now, we’ve discovered evidence in the latest Spotify app that suggests the company may be preparing another long-requested upgrade: editable usernames.

Even as Spotify adds more social features like Jams, Blends, collaborative playlists, and now messaging, finding people on the platform is still awkward.

Unlike traditional social media networks, Spotify doesn’t let you search for someone by a unique username. Searching by display name also isn’t very helpful when thousands of users can share the same name. Messaging someone new isn’t straightforward either.

As The Verge points out, Spotify currently limits messaging to people you’ve already interacted with through its other social features. You can’t just look up a user globally and start chatting with them, unless you use invite links. But we’ve found evidence that Spotify could soon do away with this limitation.

In version 9.1.20.1132 of Spotify’s Android app, we spotted new code strings that strongly suggest that the platform is working on allowing users to edit their usernames.

There’s also an internal description that explicitly reveals what’s coming:

A page that allows editing the user’s social handle (called username in the UI)

That wording is important. Spotify isn’t just cleaning up labels, it’s clearly framing usernames as social handles, a term that’s mostly used to describe user profiles on traditional social media apps than in music players.

Existing Spotify usernames and what’s changing

Spotify technically already has usernames, but they are not at all user-friendly, and haven’t been for years.

Since 2018, all new Spotify accounts receive automatically generated alphanumeric usernames. Before that, users could choose their own unique username during account creation. Once set, this username became permanent and could not be edited.

The current auto-generated usernames also serve as unique identifiers for your account, which is why Spotify doesn’t let you change them.

That setup works fine for a private listening app. But with messaging, group chats, and other social features entering the picture, the lack of simpler, customizable usernames is becoming more evident by the day.

These new editable usernames should make it easier to find and interact with Spotify users without relying on links or previous interactions. What’s unclear is when the feature will roll out and if the existing alphanumeric usernames will continue to exist in some form, given that Spotify binds them to users’ accounts.