How do I circumvent Spotify's updater for my regular users in Windows?

Question

I run a Windows Vista machine where I have Spotify installed. My account is the only account with administrator rights on the machine, which means only I can update Spotify. This means that any other user on the machine won't be able to run Spotify if there is an update that I haven't installed.

Is there any way to circumvent this?

EDIT: I tried setting up a task in the Task Scheduler to start spotify.exe with administrative rights any time someone logged in, which I hoped would allow an update, but it didn't, so I'm open to new suggestions.

EDIT 2: This is now irrelevant. Since a couple of updates ago Spotify has moved to an inline update model allowing all users to update the client.

Answer 1

Apparently it's the official position of Spotify to allow only the latest version. This is probably because copyright concerns require the immediately blocking of any new hacks of their software.

There's apparently no solution - only an administrator can run it when a new update comes out.

The only solution is maybe to create a virtual machine for Spotify, where anyone could have administrator rights without running a risk. You can freely download ready-made Linux VMs, and this article explains how to install Spotify on Linux.

Answer 2

Yes i agree you can set a task to update spotify, and can set what privileges it runs with

Answer 3

Spotify consists of a single .exe file, which can be run from anywhere, like the desktop. It does write to %APPDATA% once run, so it is not portable as such, but there is no need to have it in Program Files.

So if you just have the most up to date spotify.exe somewhere on the network, you can distribute shortcuts pointing to it for your users, or you can just email them the .exe in a .zip file.

Anybody can extract the .exe from the installer using something like Universal Extractor, if needed.

Answer 4

If you've got Windows Vista or Windows 7 you could select use the Run as Administrator option in Compatibility Mode.

Answer 5

Try setting %ProgramFileS%/Spotify and everything below as writable by users. This should work. New versions just overwrite the old executable.

Answer 6

If you run the updater (which may be a separate executable named "update.exe" or similar) from a startup script, it will run whenever the machine starts regardless of who logs on later. That can be done in the policy editor from your administrative account. Perhaps, even if you need to run the full application that way, it should still work and the users will simply find it running when they log in. However, it will be running under your credentials.

An an alternative, don't even use the program's updater, but just copy the new files into the program's folder from an updated version. Just be sure that files containing user settings are not copied by mistake: just exe's and dll's.

Of course, practically speaking, setting Spotify to always run under admin privileges would not give users any additional rights except that they could then update.