Ludvig Strigeus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus?wprov=sfti1 wrote the original client, and fast, lean, native clients was his modus operandi. OpenTTD and uTorrent were both built the same way. I’ve been wondering on and off over the years why Spotify abandoned it. My guess is that it was hard to scale that approach and that a hybrid browser client was easier to scale when there are many different engineering teams working on different parts of the client.

I worked with a few people (tech) that Spotify later hired. Sweden is kind of small.

The calibre went from extremely high to surprisingly average within a decade. Not bad, to be clear, but kinda mid. I think they scaled too quickly and hit the 'bozo effect'.

Yes, anecdotal.