Android app not showing album art

[wickedninja]

Plan

Premium

Device

Oppo Find X2 Pro / Lenovo P11 Pro

Operating System

Android 12 / 11

My Question or Issue:

Album art stops being displayed in library. Reinstalling the app temporarily fixes the problem, but it returns after a couple of days. Artist artwork and playlist covers seem to keep working just fine. I have quite a large library of saved albums/artists, so maybe this a contributing factor.

There is a previous thread about this, but it has been marked as fixed, and clearly the issue is not fixed. The same problem occurs on my tablet and phone.

[Alex]

Hey @wickedninja,

Thanks for reaching out about this in the Community!

If you have a very large library with 10, 000+ items, this could be causing certain data like album art to be loading slowly or not loading at all. 

This issue is most likely related to how the app saves cache on your phone, since it gets resolved after clearing the app data and cache (clean reinstall).

If you're using an SD card, you can try the following:

1. Uninstall the app
2. Remove the SD card 
3. Reinstall the app without putting back the SD card in the phone

Try using the app like that for a few days if possible to check if the issue returns.

Keep us posted on how you get on.

[huzzahforalex]

Hi @Alex,

Would just like to say I've also been experiencing this problem for a few weeks now where the album art stops showing up when Spotify takes up about 600 MB and I have to clear cache and stored app data and then login (and update my preferences to remove autoplay, canvas and change quality settings each time and then change my library to show Albums sorted by Creator and then I can go back to using the app). In the end I have to do this every couple of days otherwise browsing for music is almost impossible. I haven't downloaded any music to device since this problem has started. 

Agree it is a storage issue, but it only appeared with a recent update and isn't related to library size (which broadly hasn't changed and is nowhere near 10,000). My guess is something goes wrong when downloading information, I'd guess creating a memory leak (it would depend on how you are storing this info - it definitely appears to be reloaded each time you scroll and I wouldn't be surprised if someone did something silly and used a linked-list), and then Spotify is unable to recover. For some reason a few of the same albums towards the top keep their album art but the vast majority lose it and never regain it. I'd report this as a bug, at my company we'd class this as a CAT-1 bug. Really hope this gets fixed ASAP. 

Been using Spotify for more than a decade and about that long on Android but it's almost unusable now, I use the desktop app where possible to select my music when at home but when out and about I have to do a ton of maintenance before being able to find music.

Using a Motorola G 5G Plus on Android 11  and running on internal storage.

[wickedninja]

Firstly, I'll just place a link here to the "fixed" thread so you can see there are still other people complaining of this ongoing issue.

Mobile app isn't showing album covers in Your Libr... - The Spotify Community

Secondly, I'll outline the following:

1. Whilst I do have a large saved library(approx. 490 albums), I doubt I am over 10,000 items.
2. This is definitely not storage related, as the issue occurs on both my tablet and phone, both of which use internal storage only.
3. Up until a couple of months ago this was not an issue, and my saved library has not changed dramatically in that time.
4. The issue does not occur on the desktop app or web player.

Hopefully this can be pushed back to the developers to look into further, as clearly there is still an issue in mobile app.

[kaeptnsema]

I'm having the same problem.

All album covers vanish from my library and only reappear after I opened the album. I cannot do this with every single album in my library, it would take too long. And after a couple of days they vanish again anyway.

After uninstalling and reinstalling the app, the album art is back, but after a couple of days vanishes again without changing any settings.

I do have a SD card in the phone, but the problem still remains if I leave all data on the internal storage.

Plan: Premium

Device: Samsung Galaxy S10+

Operating System: Android 12, One UI 4.1

[Jeremy]

Hi there folks,

Thank you for your replies and feedback. We're sorry that this happens to you and we'd like to continuing assisting you.

We can confirm as mentioned above - this issue is most likely related to how the app saves cache on your device and it can take time to load if you have a 10, 000+ items.

However - Can you confirm that you followed the steps that's provided in this article when you've reinstalled the app as there's some more steps to help thoroughly uninstall the app from your device, so if you haven't, we'd highly suggest it.

We'll keep an eye out for your replies.

Take care!

[wickedninja]

Thanks for picking this one up Jeremy.

I performed another uninstall on both my devices and confirmed on each device that the removal process does delete that data folder highlighted by the clean install instructions, so previous reinstall attempts also cleared this data.

I also cleared a few albums from my library and now have 452, so again, I'm pretty confident that my item count would be under 10,000, although it would still be large. It would be great if there was something in the app settings which actually displayed the library item count though; it would be handy when trying to troubleshoot issues like this.

Everything works fine for a day or two and then the issue comes back.

[Jeremy]

Hey again @wickedninja,

Thank you for your reply and confirmation and for the troubleshooting you've done so far 🙂
 

Can you have someone log in on their account on your device - such as a friend or a family member? This will help us understand if it's account related or not.

Keep us posted.

Cheers!

[Mckird]

I have the same issue using a Realme GT Neo 2 with Android 12. Only solution ist to reinstall the app but this does help only for a few days.

[Mckird]

I would like to add that this problem occurs on my second device (Galaxy Tab S5e) too. Could it be account related?

[Vasil]

Hey @Mckird,

We appreciate the provided information!
As this could be account/cache related, it'd be worth the shot to contact our customer support guys so that they can check if everything is ok with your saved data on Spotify's end.

Let us know how it goes 🙂
We'll be on the lookout for your response.

[wickedninja]

@jeremy

So after a few days of testing a few different scenarios, I'm pretty sure the problem is account related. What leads me to this conclusion is the following:

1. I performed a clean reset of the app on both my phone and tablet at the same time. However, I logged back into the app on each device with about a 12 hour gap, with the phone being first.
2. This time round though, I did not actually use either my phone or tablet to listen to Spotify at all.
3. After approximately 3 days my phone stopped showing the album art, and the cached data was only about 20MB. 
4. Even though the phone had stopped working, my tablet was still showing the album art. However, after approximately 12 hours, the table stopped showing album art as well.

This is most certainly not a device problem, nor a local cache problem. I've even tried the "log out of all devices", but nothing seems to stop this from happening.

Hope the above information offers some direction for the team to work out where the problem is.

Thanks.

[kaeptnsema]

I followed the instructions for clean reinstall and it still happened again.

According to the android settings, spotify uses 1.62 GB of data storage and 18 MB cache. According to spotify settings, I have 1 MB downloads and 1.5 GB cache.

Not sure if that helps...

[kaeptnsema]

Is it possibly related to forcibly shutting down the app a lot every day? Maybe by forcing it to close, it does not reaalocate the storage space correctly or something along those lines...
I have to forcibly close the app every time I want to start listening because of the bug with the disappearing "now playing" bar: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Now-Playing-bar-missing-on-Android/idi-p/5364978

[Vasil]

Hey folks!

Thank you for keeping us posted.

With any larger library, the app might encounter similar issues to what you're experiencing.
One thing we'd recommend trying is to check for albums that are particularly large (30 tracks and more).
Copy those over to playlists, remove them from the library, perform another clean reinstall and let us know if the issue still persists afterwards.
Much appreciated!

@kaeptnsema 
@wickedninja

[kaeptnsema]

Thanks for your reply, Vasil.

Is there a trick to find out which album has more than 30 tracks? I'm sure you don't expect us to click trough all of them one by one 😅

Anyhow, if spotify lists albums with more than 30 songs the library should be able to handle them, shouldn't it?

I would appreciate a bugfix rather than a tedious workaround...

Have you been able to recreate the problem on a test device? I guess it's difficult because it only occurs after a few days of using the app 😔

[johnnye]

My android app is not displaying album art in library

[Kiril]

Hey @johnnye,

Thanks for posting in the Community!

We understand that you're not seeing album art inside your library. Please take a moment to look through the suggestions given earlier in this thread. Have you done some troubleshooting so far and what, so we don't make you repeat unneeded steps? Keep in mind that if your collection is large, a slower (longer) loading time for the album art is to be expected. 

It's also worthwhile to perform a clean reinstall of the app. Please follow the steps given in the link, as the process is a bit different than the normal one and ensures that no cached data causes interference with the new installation of your app. 

Hope this helps. Let us know how you get on.

[quimerinha]

Are there any developments on this? It's been happening for months and still no fix in sight aside from reinstalling the app every couple of weeks. I've cleared cache in-app, on android app settings, cleared data, and only reinstallations seem to fix it and only for a few days then the problem comes back. I pay for premium in order not to have to download all my 20GB> library every couple of days because of issues like this, seriously consering migrating at this point if the "to-go" response will still be "just clear cache and reinstall" everytime instead of an actual insight on what you guys are doing (that is, if there's even anything being done) on the development end to fix it.

[Mckird]

I also had this problem (see my posts above). The fix: I chatted with the support and they detected that there was an issue with my offline data so they reseted all my offline data. After that i had to reinstall the app and now my problem seems fixed because it didn't reappear for a week or so.