Help Needed: Spotify Device Not Available When App or Tab Is Closed

Runjunkumar — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 06:17:42 GMT

Hi everyone,

We are a home and hotel automation company. We’ve recently introduced a feature where users can control their room ambiance using predefined scenes such as "Party Scene", "Morning Scene", and so on. When a user activates a scene like "Party Scene", our system automatically adjusts the lights and starts playing a Spotify playlist selected by the user.

We have successfully integrated the Spotify Web API and can control music playback. However, we’re facing a serious issue:

If the user closes the Spotify app or browser tab (in the case of Web Playback SDK), we get a "device not available" error. As a result, only the lights respond to the scene, but the music does not play. This breaks the experience and leaves users disappointed.

We are looking for a solution to handle this gracefully on both the frontend and backend. Ideally, we want to:

Detect when no active device is available.
Automatically switch to or prompt the user to open a valid device.
Ensure the experience is seamless with minimal user effort.

If anyone has faced a similar situation or has any suggestions, we would really appreciate your help.

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,
Runjun kumar

Re: Help Needed: Spotify Device Not Available When App or Tab Is Closed

Ximzend — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 19:41:31 GMT

Hi @Runjunkumar

Thank you for posting in the Spotify Community, and Welcome!

You wrote your app also targets hotels. Be aware that it is prohibited to use Spotify in a business setting.

Instead, business should use Soundtrack.

Soundtrack can import Spotify playlists, and has its own API.

Let me know how it goes!

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Help Needed: Spotify Device Not Available When App or Tab Is Closed

Re: Help Needed: Spotify Device Not Available When App or Tab Is Closed