A WPCentral reader has asked Pandora about their constantly changing API which breaks (unauthorized) third party clients regularly, and received this response:

Thanks for writing and for the feedback. Thanks also for your interest in having Pandora on Windows Phone 7. We are not developing an app at this time, but we will definitely keep it in mind while planning our product priorities for the future.

We know that our recent release has broken most unsupported Pandora clients, and we do apologize for the surprise and inconvenience that undoubtedly caused to your listening experience.

At a basic level, third-party applications are violating our Terms of Use and are obviously not authorized to sell (or give away) something that fundamentally derives its value from our product.

Beyond the boilerplate, though, the fact is that–while the use you are writing in about seems designed mainly to help folks listen to Pandora in their own way–some folks do use third-party unsupported client libraries in a harmful way, and so we make changes when we need to prevent this. Regrettably, we have no way of targeting changes towards some unsupported clients and not others–some are respectful of our business, but unfortunately we can’t tell them from those that are not.

Even disregarding attempts at malicious use, we do of course still have to continue to upgrade our software, and unsupported clients have been broken by these sorts of routine changes many times in the past as well.

We definitely do recognize that our actions limit the options available to well-intentioned listeners who do not want to use any of our endorsed clients, and we’re genuinely sorry for the inconvenience this brings to our enthusiastic listeners like yourself! We really appreciate your support of the service and respect the DIY spirit, but our hand has been forced on this issue.

Thanks so much for your understanding, and thanks again for reaching out.

While the Pandora  respondent clearly harboured Windows Phone no ill will, the same can not be said of the company as a whole, who have stubbornly refused to support Windows Phone despite clients for Spotify, Rhapsody, Last.FM, Rdio and others all appearing in Marketplace.

So if you have been holding out for an official version of the Pandora app, stop holding your breath and enjoy all the hacked versions already in Marketplace.

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