Exit button???

[thesundancekid1]

Hi! I just upgraded to the latest android app, and now there is no close/exit button.. ?? I dont want to logout, just close the app.

[Afront]

I found the exit button:

1. Long press your Android Home button.
2. Select Task manager.
3. Click Exit next to Spotify.

[thesundancekid1]

Thanx for your help, but it seems that theres no "Home" button either.. 😞 .. or am I totally lost.. (This is the absolute latest upgrade).

Thanx again!

[thesundancekid1]

Sorry, I missunderstod you about the "Home" button. Yes, I have a homebutton on the phone 🙂 but I was serching for the internal exit button in spotify, just as in the older app..

Thanx again!

[hnilsen]

You don't exit the app. Put it on pause if you're playing a song, and it will not run any more. It's saved in RAM so that you can open it and come in where you left it, but this doesn't take up resources on the phone. Exit is not necessary and hasn't been on Android since 2009.

[thesundancekid1]

Well I like to close down the app to save the battery. When you just pause it, the app is still running in the background..

[hnilsen]

No it's not. The state is saved and the app uses no resources at all. It's like saying files on your sd card uses resources and draining battery. The os handles this perfectly.

[thesundancekid1]

I´m not so shure of that. When I sometimes just leave spotify on pause, the battery gets empty much faster than if

I close down the app.

[hnilsen]

I've read somewhere that android has a bug on some versions (Media Server?), and the spotify music service might hang. If that is the case then spotify can seem to drain, or be the cause of the drain. Which phone, os and spotify version do you use?

[licenced]

Programs that have services, as spotify does, do stiill run in the background. You can confirm this easily by starting downloading a playlist and then return to your home screen - downloads continue and the app state is not paused.

On a more insidious level, spotify uses P2P to distribute music and it appeared to be doing that on the preview release even when you had specifically disabled downloading over 2g/3g ... I really hope this is fixed but haven't had a chance to confirm yet

[alangkidd]

With the music on pause, press the back button until you are back to the home screen. If there is no music playing, Spotify exits.

[thesundancekid1]

If you press the backbutton until your back to homescreen, and then, as it is in my HTC, go to preferences, program, handle program, current, then spotify is still going. You have to kill it there to close it.

[hnilsen]

That doesn't mean that it's actually doing something. It's there because it has a service that listens for a "Play"-event. It's paused and doesn't do anything. That service doesn't do anything but lay dormant until the OS tells it to react to something. Spotify in itself is not running, it's state is justed saved in RAM so that when you start Spotify again, and it's still in RAM, it'll bring you right into where you left off.

This is a good thing and it's the way Android is meant to work. iPhones do almost the same thing, by the way. It's opposite of what you'd expect from a computer, but having the RAM full is how it's intended to be. That does not mean that apps are running.

The service, however, does run for the reasons I told you (listening for you to press play so that it can start playing music again without ever opening Spotify). 

There has been reports of a bug that seems to be related to the Android OS itself, where a native service called MediaServer which is run whenever you need to give the user sound or video. It's used by *all* applications that play music for instance. If this is causing you problems, I don't know. It's not easy to test either because it's battery usage will most likely be reported as Spotify - not MediaServer.

So, for a wrap up; If you keep killing apps on Android, you'll drain battery when starting the apps. This seems counter-intuitive, but it's the truth. That's why the Android Team has stated that no apps should have an exit button. You won't ever need it.

And it seems that you have an HTC; Try long-pressing the Home-button (the house-icon) and see if that gives you the task switcher. If you have a newer HTC One X (or same series), there should be a task switcher button which you can use.

[thesundancekid1]

It sounds logical what you say, I guess I´m still in some analog feeling about closing stuff. Thanx to you all!

[licenced]

---

@hnilsen wrote:
No it's not. The state is saved and the app uses no resources at all. It's like saying files on your sd card uses resources and draining battery. The os handles this perfectly.

---

Not quite true in this case though. Today I put Spotify in the background, locked my phone and left the house - at which point i was on 3g rather than wifi. Throughout the morning i left my phone on my desk, only checking it for the  time occasionally, but noticed that the battery was depleting quickly. At 2:30 i went back into the Spotify app and put it into offline mode before starting to listen to music. It has been in offline mode ever since.

According to the android information screen Spotify used 135MB of mobile data today. The only time it can have done this is while it was in the background as any other time I was either on wifi or had itset to offline mode.

The fact that its using so much data on 3g is a bug let alone the fact its doing it in the background.

[KarmaSlave]

For me, Spotify force closes (as in the popup) whenever I do some "heavy surfing" in for example Dolphin Browser. It can be hours after I used Spotify to listen to music. This makes it seem like Spotify is indeed doing something that it can't keep doing because of low phone resources.

If it hadn't done anything, Android would have just killed the idle process silently just as it should, but it doesn't. It crashes.

This wouldn't happen if I could just exit the app.

[mrbrutus86]

https://www.spotify.com/se/help/faq/mobile/android-how-do-i-store-offline-music-on-the-external-sd-c...

The steps in this guide doesn't work on my Motorola Razr Maxx with the latest version of spotify mobile. I cant access the setupscreen through the hardware menukey!

I'm using the newest version of spotify mobile 0.5.2.87

on my phone with gingerbread 2.3.6

I need to sync my playlists because I work in an enviroment where i cant use the radio transmitters on my phone. 8 gb wich i have for internal storage in my phone is not enought for my playlists so i need spotify to access my 32 gb memorycard.

I don't really understand why spotify took off what is really an essential feature.

For spotify admins, please remove the website FAQ that tells people incorrectly that they can still do this!!

[pigtank]

I need to move and download offline playlists to external SD also. This must be fixed, I just bought 12 months premium. You know how much I'm gonna download in that time!?

[Kadoka]

I just downloaded the update, found it intolerable and switched back to the old one.

Why?

Well, first of all the emphasis on this update appears to be on providing users with a better UI, something that looks more ICSy. For a company that is claimed to have listened to its users to spend all their time on the UI is slightly defeating the object. The request from most users including myself was to build upon the features in the old version and correct some basic problems and introduce the features that were missing. If they found time to update the design then that was always going to be a plus. What we actually end up with is nothing short of a revamp that fixed many problems while creating too many others.

The problems with the new version that were not there with the old:

NO SD CARD ACCESS: WTF!?   This is a completely unforgivable mistake. Proof that the peeps at Spotify are not on the same planet as their users.

NO LIBRARY: Now I can't access my local files or any of my library separately for that matter.

The basic features that the old and new versions lack.

No ability to sort playlists

No ability to filter playlists by say artist, genre etc

No ability to remember the state of a playlist. Once you close down spotify and reenter you have to start from the top of the list.

Stability. No force closes, freezing of screen.

If the new version had updated the above 5 main areas I think the majority of us would have forgiven a slightly below par design. After all the majority of us could not care less about the design.

Please spotify, for the next update focus on the functionality of the APP. Listen to your users. No one gives a ***t about whether they can use radio (which is a feature of LAST.FM anyway) or not.

I am not going to run away from your service like others have but my patience is running thin.

[Josef]

I agree with you completely. Customer service was nice and got back to me about the external SD card screw up, but they said they don't have a date yet on when they will fix their error. I'm not ditching yet, but I'm not sure how much longer I'm willing to wait for the Sunday mail here. Also, their new UI is MUCH WORSE for use in the car because the screen is too bright to use while driving at night. I mean, at least if you're the kind who likes to listen to music in the car at night. Or is that just silly? I'm just in shock that they don't let the user specify where to keep the files. This is why I hate not having root access to my phone be default. It forces developers to try and anticipate my every need and leaves me powerless to fix it when they fail. This would take me all of two minutes to fix on a real computer.