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

"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."

"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."