Occasional Spotify playback controls out of sync with actual playback

[tinoucas]

Plan

Premium

Country

 France

Device

LG G6

Operating System

Android 8.0

My Question or Issue
I've only had the phone since a little more than a month, when I received it brand new, so the install is quite fresh.
I noticed some bad behavior with Spotify: sometimes, when starting playback, the UI doesn't change (the play button remains "play" instead of becoming "pause"), and there is no other way to stop it (that I've found) than to close the app (with a swipe in recent apps).
Relaunching the app has, so far, always worked and restores the behavior to normal.

I'm always connected to a bluetooth receiver (FiiO BTR1), so I can't say if it can happen on speakers or headphones as well. I tried repeating my usage to find a pattern on how to trigger it, but no luck.
Anyway, here is a list of scenarios where it happened:

- connecting to bluetooth with phone screen off, starting playback with my pebble's music control thing.
- connecting to bluetooth with phone screen on, starting playback with the bottom right play button in Spotify.
- and the weirdest one: connected to bluetooth, I was listening to the end of an album (started in a previous session), playback stopped at the end of the last track, as configured, and I pressed the bluetooth "play" button of the receiver to restart the album. At that point, track 1 of the album was playing (through bluetooth), but I still had the background notification/service displayed from previous playback, still showing the "play" button and the last track of the album (as if there hadn't been any "play" triggered).

In other words, when it happens, it seems to reveal that Spotify has another way than the background notification/service thing to play audio, and the whole UI controls of playback are broken. The rest of the app UI doesn't seem affected in any noticeable way.

I can't find if anyone already reported a similar issue, other than the very popular "my notification is blocked by android" problem.

[SergioDavid]

Hey @tinoucas, welcome to the Community!

Sorry to hear you're having trouble with this. We'll do our best to help 🙂

Does this happen while on your home WiFi? If so, does restarting your router make a difference? 

Also, when you face this, instead of closing the app from your recent apps, try switching to another app and then switching back.

Let us know how it goes.

[tinoucas]

Hi!

I only listen to Spotify on my phone during commute, so only on LTE, where the reception allows it.

I will try that, switching to another app and back, and tell you how it goes.

I forgot to mention something that may be specific to the LG G6, or LG phones: when I paired the bluetooth receiver it asked me if I wanted it to launch my "default music app" after each connect. And I set that default app to be Spotify. If it's not related to the issue, it works great 🙂

[tinoucas]

Hi,

The problem didn't manifest itself again. I don't know what fixed it, so here are 3 things that happened:

1. I talked about it here.
2. Spotify has been updated (with the usual information free "what's new").
3. I uninstalled Microsoft OneDrive.

Now, the reason for number 3 to be on this list is that, sometimes, when no music was playing, pressing a bluetooth "play" button would launch OneDrive. Yes, OneDrive. I can't imagine what kind of use case scenario can be behind this. I didn't see how it could be related to this problem, but since it's gone, I thought I might as well mention it.

I haven't reinstalled it since, but will most likely do when I need it again.

[fengapapit]

Hello,

since your problems seem to be the same as in https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Several-problems-since-last-update-bugged-controls-music-st... , can you confirm that updating fixed the problems permanently ?

It's still not working correctly as the date of this message.