Myspoti: an ad-free Spotify client by a 16-year-old developer, 1,500 stars in 23 days, the stars were tapped out by a hundred thousand downloads

In 2026, Oct 14, a GitHub account with just one repo, kota-zo, created myspoti. Its Sponsors page says: "I'm the young (16-year-old) developer behind Myspoti." 23 days later, on Nov 6, the repo had 1,515 stars, up 181 that single day. Over the same period, the APKs across all its Releases had been downloaded about 109k times, and v2.4.0, released 11-05, alone got 14.2k downloads in one day. This piece covers why it took off, where the stars came from, and, if you want to build a project that pulls in stars like this, what's worth copying and what needs a hard second look.

A post on a Turkish forum

Oct 28, on the "Apps" board of the Turkish TV-box forum Sinetech, user alikoo opened a thread titled "Ad-free Spotify alternative MySpoti". The body was a single line: "Saw it on X today, it's the Spotify you know, and it's pretty good." The thread got 21 reactions and the replies ran two pages. One person installed it and said: "For me the biggest plus is Android Auto support." Another got stuck on signup: "I downloaded it but can't log in. I want to register, but I can't select my birth month." Someone below replied: "Register in a browser first."

This thread shows who Myspoti's users are: not developers, but ordinary people who want to listen to Spotify for free on their phone and in the car without ads. They found it through X, forums and APK sites, installed it, and starred the GitHub repo on the way. Going by 11-06's numbers, the ratio of stars to downloads is roughly 1 to 75.

What it is

A third-party Spotify client for Android, written in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, GPL-3.0. The first line of the README is blunt: "Ad-free Spotify on a free account."

How it works: it hides Spotify's official Web Player inside an invisible WebView in the app, and that player plays music through the phone's own DRM. Myspoti draws its own interface on top, drives the player, and turns off ad slots. So it uses your own Spotify account, playlists and catalog, plays are still reported to Spotify and counted toward artist streams and your Wrapped; no need to modify the official app, no root required. It does not do offline downloads itself; that's handled by a "download source extension" written by others, and FLAC, M4A, MP3 are decided by the extension.

Feature-complete for a project only 23 days old: two visual styles (one called Immersive, ported from the open-source project BitChord, with credits in the README), Spotify Connect and Jam, Android Auto and Android TV, word-synced lyrics, Genius lyric annotations, official MVs, collaborative playlists, 69 languages. The README also says 2.0 is "a new app rewritten from scratch"; in version 1.x, offline audio originally fetched from YouTube built in, and 2.0 moved that into an extension.

Why now

The old tools just died, and users were short on options. On Android, "free Spotify without ads" has long drawn a big crowd. Over the past year the older routes fell one by one: Spotify began a large-scale crackdown on modded APKs in March 2025; ReVanced's Spotify patch was pulled in September 2025 after a DMCA from Spotify; xManager (12k stars) was archived and stopped updating in April 6 2026. Myspoti launched in October and picked up the people left with no tool.

The author went straight to the old tools' user communities. The author posted the v1.0.0 introduction on r/xManagerApp, r/SpotifyLatestModAPK and r/spotifyapi, and posted again at 1.1 and 2.0 for each major release; at least 7 posts are findable. r/xManagerApp is the community that stayed behind after xManager stopped updating.

The route looks safer. It doesn't ship a modified Spotify package, login goes through Spotify's own page, and the app never sees your password. For users, "not a cracked build" feels a lot safer than a sketchy MOD APK, and there's less fear of a ban. Still, the README includes its own disclaimer: blocking ads violates Spotify's terms of use, and Spotify may suspend the account. Italian tech blog GuruHiTech 11-01 also specifically warned about this in its write-up.

It's the only one doing all of it. Spotilol does the same ad-blocking by wrapping Web Player (2026-07 created, 515 stars), but it's just a web wrapper. Spotube (50.6k stars), BitChord and SimpMusic use YouTube Music as the audio source and can only import Spotify playlists, so it isn't "your Spotify." SpotX (23k stars) only covers desktop. Users want "my Spotify, just without ads," and right now on Android only this one delivers all three: your own account and audio, no modified official app, and a native experience.

One person ships extremely fast. From 10-16 to 11-05 there were 24 releases (including betas), with 441 commits almost all from the author alone. The app has one-tap updates and also supports auto-updates through Obtainium. On the Sponsors page he writes that donations go toward "the AI tools I use to improve the app, fix bugs, and build new features."

Where users come from

The star curve is a series of steps: each release causes a jump the next day (daily stars, UTC):

Distribution roughly falls into four layers:

• Reddit's modded Spotify community, where the author posted himself, confirmed. Post upvotes weren't retrieved.
• APK repost sites and forums: android-zone.ws reposts every release, appteka has several different uploaders, and a batch of "Spotify Premium MOD APK" keyword sites also list it. These sites run on big search terms like "spotify premium apk" and "no ads," and they redistribute it automatically with each new version.
• Small blogs and forums across countries: Italy's YourLifeUpdated (10-26) and GuruHiTech (11-01), audio-file.org (10-30), and Turkey's Sinetech (10-28; the thread author says he saw it on X, and I couldn't identify which account).
• TikTok and YouTube Shorts from small accounts: each has a few hundred to tens of thousands of views, no large accounts, and no sign of paid promotion.

Not present: Hacker News, Product Hunt, major tech media, and large accounts on X. It has spread entirely within the circle of people looking for cracked Spotify, and the developer community barely knows it exists.

Who it's competing with

Copycats have already appeared, but not in a good way: a repo called SpotiMy-Vanced was created 10-12, its description reads "Spotify Ad Blocker 2026," and at 11-03 it had 1,209 stars and 0 forks, a classic star-bait repo (it may well bundle malware, my inference), and it's now 404. On GitLab someone is already making a "patched version" of Myspoti's APK.

This moat is fragile: if Spotify changes the Web Player, it could break temporarily (the author says the app reads the new Web Player's interface automatically, but how well that holds up is unknown), and a DMCA could take the repo down entirely, as happened with ReVanced. The author himself writes in the README that closed-source or unattributed copies will be reported with DMCA notices.

If it were you

B. An unknown author reached 23 stars in 1,500 days, and it came from real downloads, about a hundred thousand, not praise from developers. That suggests followers of this approach can get traction too. But the "ad-free Spotify on Android" spot is already held by someone who ships almost daily and has the feature set covered, so a clone would struggle to catch up. The whole thing also sits against Spotify's terms, so the repo could be pulled by a single DMCA at any time, and the stars and track record would go with it.

Who it suits: developers who write Android / Kotlin, can accept a project living in a gray area that may get taken down, and have the discipline to ship a version every day or two and answer issues daily, the way kota-zo does.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone who wants a project for their resume and homepage that lasts (a DMCA erases it, and a "Spotify ad-blocker" repo may not even help in interviews); anyone who plans to build one version on a weekend and leave it alone (stars for this kind of project follow releases, and they stop growing when updates stop).

How to do it: don't build a second Android Spotify ad-blocking client. Three approaches are worth pursuing:

1. Apply the same approach to other services: find a service where mobile apps are heavily restricted but the web version is lenient, and where the original modding tool has just gone down. Then use "official web player wrapped in a native shell" to reach that tool's former users. Which service fits is for you to research (my guess: free-tier music or video services with ads are the closest match).
2. Build what Myspoti didn't do well: it exposes an extension interface with a sandbox and desktop debugging tools. Extensions for lyrics sources, home-page sections, radio, or stats carry low compliance risk and can live in their own repos, borrowing Myspoti's user base to earn stars. Download-source extensions are the most popular, and also the most likely to draw legal letters.
3. Only borrow the structure, leave out the ads: "wrap the official web player in a native app" is a general technique. Building a native shell for a service that has no decent Android or desktop client but a good web version, without removing ads or touching copyright, will earn fewer stars, but the repo will survive.

How to get users: follow Myspoti's order. First post an introduction in the community of the old tool that just went down. Post again with every major release. Put the APK on GitHub Releases, support in-app one-tap updates and Obtainium, and let the repost sites track your version numbers on their own. The first line of the README should be something an ordinary user understands ("Ad-free Spotify on a free account"), not a technical term.

Timing: there's a window for the step of taking over the old tool's users. xManager's former users were already picked up by Myspoti this round. If you build for a different service, the window is the few months after that service's main modding tool goes down.

Signs this read is wrong: (1) Within one or two months Spotify sends Myspoti a DMCA and the repo goes offline, meaning "the Web Player route is more durable" doesn't hold, and this path should drop to C or even D; (2) someone builds a native shell this way for another service and reaches over a thousand stars within 30 days, meaning the approach is replicable and the grade should go up; (3) Myspoti stops updating for a month and its stars keep climbing, meaning the demand itself drives growth, not the author's release cadence, so a clone still has room.

Data and sources

• GitHub: kota-zo/myspoti README, Release download counts, commit count (11-06); daily star history (since 10-17); Sponsors page (11-06,1,515 stars, 13 sponsors, amounts not public).
• Community: the author's posts on Reddit r/xManagerApp, r/SpotifyLatestModAPK and r/spotifyapi (I only got search snippets, no upvote counts); the Turkish Sinetech forum thread 10-28; repost pages such as android-zone.ws and appteka.
• Media: YourLifeUpdated (10-26), GuruHiTech (11-01), audio-file.org (10-30).
• Short video: TikTok @minutechbuilds (10-27, about 24k views), @prinonturio (11-04); YouTube "Minute Tech" (746 views).
• Background: ReVanced's DMCA notice and TorrentFreak's coverage 2025-09-15; archive records of the xManager repo.
• Unverified: how much of the 109k downloads come from the same person re-downloading each version (real install counts could be a fraction of that); which X account had the traffic; whether SpotiMy-Vanced is malware.