I’m working on an app and I need to send users to certain points in Spotify podcast episodes. Here’s what I want to do:
When someone taps a button in my app, it should open Spotify and go straight to a specific time in a podcast episode. Like if I want them to hear something at 23 minutes and 45 seconds into the show.
Does anyone know if this is possible? Can Spotify’s API do this? Or is there some kind of deep linking trick that works?
I’ve been searching online but haven’t found a clear answer. Has anyone figured out how to make this work? It would be super helpful for my project if there’s a way to do it.
I’ve encountered this issue in my own development work. Spotify’s time-based linking is indeed the solution. To implement it, you’ll need to construct a URL with the episode URI and append the timestamp parameter. The format is ‘spotify:episode:[ID]?t=[time]’, where [time] is in seconds. For example, to link to 23:45 in an episode, you’d use ‘?t=1425’. Keep in mind that this works reliably in the mobile app, but desktop behavior can be inconsistent. Testing across platforms is crucial to ensure a smooth user experience.
hey there! i’ve actually done something similar before. spotify has a feature called time-based linking that lets u do this. u need to add a timestamp parameter to the spotify URI or URL. it looks like this: ?t=1m30s for 1 min 30 secs. hope that helps ur project!
As someone who’s worked extensively with podcast apps, I can confirm that Spotify’s time-based linking is the way to go. I’ve implemented this in a few projects, and it’s pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it.
One thing to keep in mind is that you’ll need to convert your timestamps to seconds. So for your example of 23 minutes and 45 seconds, you’d use 1425 seconds in the URL.
A pro tip: I’ve found it helpful to create a utility function in my code that takes minutes and seconds as input and returns the total seconds. This makes it much easier to generate these links on the fly without having to do the math each time.
Also, don’t forget to thoroughly test on both iOS and Android. In my experience, there can sometimes be slight differences in how these deep links are handled across platforms.