Skip Songs in Spotify using Custom Rules with Skipify

We may earn a commission for purchases made using our links.

Spotify took the music streaming industry by storm with its paid and free service over the years. The features offered combined with the collection of music available make it very hard to compete with. Still, no service is perfect for everyone. Features like Spotify Radio and the shared playlists are great ways to discover new music, but some people just loathe certain songs and/or artists. Wouldn’t it be better if there was a way to automatically skip songs in Spotify by certain artists or from certain albums? Thankfully, there is a way to skip Spotify tracks with custom filters and it’s possible thanks to a free application called Skipify.

With this application installed, you can go in and create custom rules including an artist, an album, or even a specific song. Once Skipify detects that Spotify is going to play something included in your custom set of rules, then it will skip songs for you. While it’s certainly not the end of the world to have to manually skip songs, it definitely enhances the user experience to have them skipped for you automatically without your intervention.

Since the user has to enable the “Device Broadcast Status” option in the settings of Spotify for this to work, we have an educated guess as to how Skipify actually works. Once that feature has been enabled, it’s likely that Skipify listens for the broadcast intent com.spotify.music.metadatachanged, via a manifest-registered implicit broadcast receiver. When the metadata of the track changes (ie. the next or previous song plays), then Spotify broadcasts the intent to any broadcast receivers listening for this intent (such as Skipify). This allows Skipify to pull the track data from the intent extras that Spotify broadcasts and checks it against your filter rules. If the track data matches one of your filter rules, then Skipify issues a media next intent directed at the Spotify application.

You can learn more about Spotify’s Android Media Notification details here.