Help - iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, iPod classic)

[edesignuk]

As much as I love Spotify on the Desktop, and I like having it in my pocket, the mobile app is really kind of terrible.

I can't sort and play by artist or album, I can't queue, I can't really do anything other than play a playlist. It doesn't release memory/storage either. If you remove songs from being available offline, you don't get your disk space back.

There hasn't been a significant update in a veeeery long time.

What are you doing to rectify this? I've been a paying subscriber for years now, I don't think it's asking much for you to give the mobile app the attention it deserves.

[tjb]

If it makes you feel any better, supposedly the Android version is even worse.

I agree though, the app is way behind their competitors in most aspects.  Hopefully the increased competition will force them to make some improvements.

[overfloater]

Not even "supposedly". Pretty much provably. ;)

Both apps do need updates and both have some glitches, "features", and mild-to-serious bugs that need fixing.

Rumblings are that a complete overhaul of the Android app is in the works, and we also know they're working on some of the more serious bugs with the iOS client, which is good news on both counts. You're right that neither interface is as user-friendly as it could be, though.

On the other hand, I haven't found a competitor that can match Spotify's catalog -- at least not in the music circles I tend to move in -- so, as it stands, the others are non-starters for me. Hopefully Spotify doesn't get too complacent about their catalog though; the apps are the primary selling point for Premium subs, so they need to be up to snuff.

[edesignuk]

Just sent them my feedback through a contact us form too.

"Why is your mobile app so terrible? (iOS)

Can't sort/play by album or artists.
Can't search while off-line cached tracks.
Can't queue.
App doesn't release memory/storage.

I have supported the idea of Spotify by being a paying subscriber for many years now.

It can't possibly have escaped your notice that mobile is where "it" is at, so I find it incredibly hard to understand why it is that you don't seem to pay any attention to the quality and feature set of your mobile app.

These features cannot be that much of a challenge to implement, there's nothing ground breaking required."

Sadly, from looking around these forums and from your responses above, it seems Spotify are more than happy to completey and utterly ignore their customers for years on end.

I agree that their catalogue is good, which is just as well, it's the only thing that keeps me using it.

I don't know for how much longer I'm willing to put up with such a shoddy mobile app though.

Yet they apparently have the time and resources to do useless nonsense like this: http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/30/2913375/spotify-facebook-timeline-music-history

FOCUS PEOPLE, FOCUS!

[overfloater]

To be fair, I doubt it's their mobile dev teams making all the social media updates. ;)

[edesignuk]

I hear you.

Never the less, it's all company money, resources, and time.

A decent mobile app would be far better appreciated by their PAYING customers than useless Facebook timelines.

[David]

Hello.

Can't sort/play by album or artists.

While you cannot sort by album / artist on a mobile application, you can still organise the tracks within a playlist. Enter into a playlist, and press the pencil button on the top right corner. Then, the tracks will change slightly. Hold over the three bars on the right of a track, and you can then change the order.

The search function in the iOS version of Spotify is pretty powerful for locating albums, however.

App doesn't release memory/storage.

A cache clearing feature is something that has come up on this community before. Two of the iOS team have posted in one major thread here saying that this is indeed something that is being looked into. Bare in mind that even if this functionality was built into a future version of Spotify, it will need to be compiled correctly, sent to Apple for certification (where it runs of the risk of being rejected) and then finally, released. This is not a quick process.

May I also take this oppitunity to remind you of the community guidelines. Double / Triple posting will be deleted. I have condensed your posts into one. 

[edesignuk]

"While you cannot sort by album / artist on a mobile application, you can still organise the tracks within a playlist. Enter into a playlist, and press the pencil button on the top right corner. Then, the tracks will change slightly. Hold over the three bars on the right of a track, and you can then change the order."

It's still utterly ridicleous that I cannot do something as simple as sort by artist or album. I don't want or need playlists for everything.

The search function doesn't seem to work at all in offline mode, which shockingly enough is where a mobile app spends most of its time.

"A cache clearing feature is something that has come up on this community before. Two of the iOS team have posted in one major thread here saying that this is indeed something that is being looked into. Bare in mind that even if this functionality was built into a future version of Spotify, it will need to be compiled correctly, sent to Apple for certification (where it runs of the risk of being rejected) and then finally, released. This is not a quick process."

I'm not buying it. You seem to have been looking in to it forever. You seem to be keen to blame Apple too. It's your app, fix it.

[tjb]

I appreciate that Spotify wants to do things correctly, which takes time. I just wish they were more communicative about which things are priorities being worked on, which things will never happen, vague timelines, etc. For example, gapless playback. The implementation is light years ahead of the weak excuse for gapless that the other streaming companies have. That's worth waiting for. But at the same time, it was one of the most requested features for something like 3 years, with basically no communication that it was even being worked on. Then one day it just appeared.

The cache issue w/ the IOS app is a pretty big deal. Will we have to wait 3 years for that? Probably not, but who knows.

[David]

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edesignuk wrote:

"While you cannot sort by album / artist on a mobile application, you can still organise the tracks within a playlist. Enter into a playlist, and press the pencil button on the top right corner. Then, the tracks will change slightly. Hold over the three bars on the right of a track, and you can then change the order."

It's still utterly ridicleous that I cannot do something as simple as sort by artist or album. I don't want or need playlists for everything.

The search function doesn't seem to work at all in offline mode, which shockingly enough is where a mobile app spends most of its time.

---

That last statement is a little confusing. In order to search for tracks / artists / albums that you don't have synced, you'll need to be online - the app will need to contact our servers in order to pull results.

However, you should be to search tracks you have synced offline using the search function. I synced a track offline, then set Spotify to offline mode. In the search section, I looked for the track and it appeared. What version of Spotify are you using on your phone?