Music streaming service Spotify is rolling out a new update for its desktop version, which removes its once-popular third-party app support.

The feature, which launched in 2011, allowed anyone to build apps to extend Spotify's functionality. A catalogue of more than 100 apps quickly built up that offered lyrics, tour dates, collective listening, music recommendations and more.


Over time, however, that catalogue became polluted as music industry marketers dived in. Festivals created apps, instead of playlists, to share who was performing. Labels built apps that listed the artists on their roster, and artists even started to build apps that were just a biography and a list of songs they'd recorded. Discovery became a real problem -- users didn't want to wade through the bilge to find the gold. So the section started to stagnate somewhat, and has remained in that state for several years while Spotify launched separate developer tools focused on taking app functionality out of Spotify and into the browser instead.

That brings us up to today and the announcement from the company that the App Finder and everything within is on death row. The next version will remove all support for third-party apps within the desktop version of Spotify. "Future releases of the Spotify Desktop client will no longer feature an App Finder tab and will no longer support the presentation of Spotify Apps, therefore this feature has been discontinued," reads the official developer page for the feature.

There's one exception. The second most popular lyrics app in the App Finder, Musixmatch, is being integrated into the main codebase of the desktop software. A button saying 'lyrics' will be added next to the play bar, which will display the lyrics of any song in Musixmatch's database. You can see how it works in this video. "We're excited to bring an update to one of our key platforms -- one that makes the experience smoother and introduces some great features and integrations," said Dave Price, director of product at Spotify. He added that he's "thrilled to bring desktop listeners such a sought-after feature as lyrics", seemingly oblivious to the fact that lyrics have been available in Spotify through different apps since 2011.

The update also brings some minor improvements to other desktop features. An improved Friend Feed will tell you what your friends are listening to in real-time, and the charts section adds indicators that show new music and how tracks are performing on a day-to-day basis.

It'll roll out gradually to all desktop users over the coming weeks. So if you're still using any apps, enjoy them while you can.