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A lot of Android phones have such a setting, which does nothing to the image itself (e.g., no color profile) but rather applies it across the board when one uses one's phone:
It's a "set and forget" thing...and in this case, it's usually terrible as, by default, the colors get so saturated they can burn a hole in your retinas. lol
The "natural" setting is about as close as I could get to what I see. (Images like this one, taken by the camera on the phone, look just like what they look like on my desktop:)
And therein lies the rub: For those that don't even know such a setting exists (and believe me, they're out there), they think their image looks great on their phone, but those viewing it on a properly-calibrated desktop monitor view otherwise. I get into it from time to time on Twitter and have to whip out Photoshop's Color Sampler Tool to prove it.
The reason the settings don’t appear to make sense is basically Spotify’s fault. All of the concerns you raise are perfectly valid and were commonly encountered…15 to 20 years ago. The only reason you are running into them today is that Spotify is using a workflow from that era, based on how the submission requirements were described. Their system is set up to only work with one color space (sRGB), and, their system is apparently not set up to recognize ICC profiles and automatically convert to sRGB, so everybody has to convert their images to it before submitting.
15-20 years ago, things were still like that in the printing/photo industry, so people generally wanted things set up the way you do now: Wanting a warning, so that a manual conversion could be done. But things are much easier now, it’s taken care of in several ways. First, most current graphics applications understand color management and profiles, so if you feed in a Display P3 image, they’ll see that, and correct for it so it doesn’t look washed out. That means you don’t need a warning or a manual conversion. And that is why the default in both Affinity Photo and Photoshop is to have the warning off: Many current workflows do not need those extra manual steps.
Today, many pro workflows let you throw in images wth all kinds of color spaces, and they’ll read the image profiles to auto-convert them to the right output color space, so no warning needed. If Spotify was set up to recognize non-sRGB profiles and auto-convert them to sRGB, they wouldn’t be causing these old-style problems or needing the old warnings.
The other big problem with having the warning on is that you have to click through the warning for any image not matching the working space, which can get old real quick if you open hundreds of images a day. So people who work that way often turn on the option to auto-convert to their working space so they don’t have to see the warnings, but the images get converted properly anyway.
@Shotophop wrote:
Who wants to export a "Display P3" type file when it's not going to look right in the end?
From the explanation above, it should be clear that a Display P3 image would look right in the end…in any properly color-managed application. So it is not true that it is not going to look right in the end. Unless you are dealing with a system that requires pre-conversion because they do not handle color profiles, like Spotify. (Or an old web browser.)
You still make a good point that people should be made aware of what color space an image is in. In Photoshop, what I like to do instead of the warning is to set the status bar at the bottom to show the Document Profile (see below). You can also display the document profile in the Info panel, if you tend to leave that open. I am not sure if Affinity Photo has a similar display option; I haven’t found it yet.
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