Also surprisingly, Apple Music is also one of the few streaming services that allows playback-capable third party clients. One can use Cider[0] among other options instead of iTunes or the Music apps.
With as opinionated as people are about music player UX, it’s surprising that Tidal or other smaller competitors haven’t embraced third party player apps. It’d be an easy win over Spotify, which deprecated libspotify ages ago and has yet to provide a playback-capable replacement despite promises otherwise.
If you have Spotify Premium, it's been possible for years to set up a Spotify Connect receiver, and you can control your connect receivers via API, so it is in fact possible to use a third party client, if one exists.
Spot knocked it out of the park with this approach. If you just want the Spotify Receiver, you could use the underlying library that doubles as a CLI, librespot, but Spot serves as a nice example of using the Spotify APIs to actually search your library and control the receiver without the Spotify app and handles this all for you.
Connect isn’t bad if your primary method of listening to music is through smart speakers or a home entertainment setup with a receiver or something, but it’s unnecessarily complicated if you just want to listen through headphones on your PC and downright impractical for mobile listening.
As for librespot, it’s nice work but it’s also technically against the TOS since it’s reverse engineered, which means Spotify could ban users using it whenever they like. There’s also risk of your favorite app using it going away if they decide to take legal action against the project.
I looked into swapping to Apple Music before but couldn't find a way to play lossless music on Linux making swapping pointless. Apparently[0] decryption for lossless isn't supported for 3rd party clients.
Tidal's catalog is disappointing but their audio quality and UX are good enough for me when I want to listen to popular songs. A lot of the music I listen to isn't even on Spotify anyway so I'm not able to just have one music streaming account.
Major drawback of Apple Hi Res is that Apple headphones dont support it (bluetooth is lossy), and even their recommended 3.5mm adapter converts it down to 48kHz (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183)
