Backstage Blog

• engineering
• update
• oauth
• authentication

tl;dr: If your app doesn’t store SoundCloud access tokens outside of the context of a user’s client (i.e. a database) the following should not affect you.

There will be upcoming changes to Access Tokens important for third parties integrated with SoundCloud. Access tokens were previously dispensed as opaque strings and going forward will be transitioning to a JWT format.

Ideally, clients should not rely on the shape/format of these tokens as this is transitive PII user data, but for example…

• engineering
• update
• oauth
• authentication

Earlier this year, we updated our API Guide to let developers know that SoundCloud authentication is now operating on the OAuth 2.1 protocol, a popular open standard used by many API providers. This change needed to be made to ensure that we are staying up-to-date in maintaining the highest level of security possible to protect our platform from potential bad actors.

As a result, we must ask that our developer community adhere to this new standard as well. We are giving developers who already implemented SoundCloud authorization using OAuth 2.0 a grace period to transition their integrations to OAuth 2.1 and ask that these updates be made by October 1, 2024, at the latest…

• Android
• Large Screen
• Optimization
• Google

Discover how SoundCloud transformed its Android app to deliver an immersive music experience on large screen devices, including tablets, foldables, and Chromebooks

• Update
• API
• Announcements

We’re working on improving our API offering. In order to do that, we need to revoke access for some developers with inactive apps. We’ve reached out directly to those who will be affected via email and we’re working to mitigate impact where we can.

• Engineering Culture
• Learning
• Knowledge Sharing

In this post, I'll share my experiences as a new SRE, reflecting on the lessons I’ve learned and challenges I’ve faced in my first year. I hope to give you an insight into the role of an SRE, and perhaps even inspire others to consider a career in this field.

• Updates
• App
• iOS
• Android

We recently made updates to our SoundCloud iOS and Android apps to address key user experience (UX) fixes according to user feedback. Read on to find out more.

• Engineering
• Interviewing

The Bar Raiser interview is a critical part of the final round of engineering interviews at SoundCloud, and it’s focused on increasing the quality of hiring, which ultimately has an impact on the products we develop for our users. In this post, we’ll talk about the training process we defined for the Bar Raiser interview.

• Updates
• App
• iOS
• Android

We recently made updates to our SoundCloud iOS and Android apps to address key user experience (UX) fixes according to user feedback. Read on to find out more.

• Android
• Images
• Picasso

The SoundCloud Android app recently got a significant makeover: a “new year, new me” type of thing. Our remarkable design team and outstanding engineers worked together to revamp the way we display all kinds of images in the app, and I’m about to take you behind the scenes on this “glow-up” journey.

• Engineering
• Humane Registry
• DevXP
• Tooling
• Automation
• Backstage

In this post, we'll describe how we took our service catalog to the next level, how we migrated our internal system to the open source Backstage developer portal technology, and how we're now providing more capabilities and empowering our engineering team, in turn speeding up software delivery and engineering effectiveness.