[Podcasts] New Episodes feed is broken

[forcehighfive]

When I scroll down my New Episodes feed to check what I've missed, at a certain point the entire feed disappears (it looks like everything gets pulled up to the top) and I'm left with a black screen. It will reset after several minutes, but every time I try to scroll down at a certain point the same issue will recur. Sometimes also happens when I press the download option or add it to My Episodes.

This has been a recurring issue for more than a month now, I keep hoping Spotify will fix it but it still hasn't happened. Photos posted below are from June 19 and July 14.

Plan Premium

Country Philippines

Device Google Pixel 6A

Operating System Android 14

App version 8.9.52.552

[forcehighfive]

Hey everyone,

Thanks for the reports! We've gone ahead and forwarded the details to our tech folks who'll investigate further. In the meantime, make sure you're always running the latest version of Spotify so that you don't miss out on any updates.

Cheers 🤘

[LazyFrog]

I also have the same problem. It's been happening for several months on my Google pixel 6A. I had cleared the cache and even reinstalled the app and it did not help. I just got a new phone( Google pixel 9) and it still has the same problem!

[nic0]

I spent nearly two hours in a chat with a support technician and got nowhere. Mutliple re-installs, cleared data/cache, logged in via app and browser. The support chat agent (Sonali D.) clearly didn't read my messages, misstated the issue I was chatting about, left lapses of 15 minutes between messages, and ultimately wasted an unreasonable amount of my time. 

Same issue, when I open "New Episodes" the app crashes. Began late last year, sometime in November or December. 

App version 9.0.22.543

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

Android version 14

One UI 6.1

Its positively frustrating that Spotify has been aware of this issue for months and has done nothing to fix it. It seems like Spotify just doesn't care, especially after the support chat. At this point, I am researching alternatives, even if I have to use separate apps for podcasts and music. 

[One_W00KIEE]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

Google Pixel Fold

Operating System

Android 15

My Question or Issue

My app crashes every time I select 'New Episodes', I have cleared app and cached data, uninstalled and reinstalled and verified i'm using the most updated version of the Android Spotify app. 

[techlover10]

Can someone please ping a Spotify engineer to have them read this thread?  It's so easy to reproduce.  Every time I take my phone out of offline and open New Episodes it crashes.  I've even hooked it up to an Android debugger and seen the error coming from the activity that it attempts to launch.  What appears to be happening is that the app is trying to simultaneously update the old podcasts list while downloading the new podcasts list, and it's crashing because the items don't match.  The second time it works most likely because the new list was downloaded and cached the previous time, so the two lists it's seeing match up.  I don't mean to sound like a know-it-all and I could be wrong, but this seems like the obvious hypothesis. If I had the source code I would gladly fix it myself.  It seems like it should be a really easy thing to address if we can just get the right engineer to see this thread.

[Achiomo]

Plan

Premium

Device

Samsung S21

My Question or Issue

I noticed that the New Episodes List for podcasts now includes locked episodes and can't be filtered. The problem is, as the list of locked episodes has grown, trying to open that list crashes the app. Did all the memory steps, clear cache, update app, etc. Any other solution?

Best I see is that locked episodes need to be filterable or removed from the list all together unless the specific podcast is being paid for.

[SpottedBadgers]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA 

Device

Pixel 9 Pro

Operating System

Android 15

My Question or Issue

When you select the "New Episodes" playlist for podcasts, if it's the first time you've done so since a new episode has been added, the app will crash. Once you reopen the app, the New Episodes playlist will be properly updated with the latest episodes and will not crash (until any other subscribed podcasts post a new episode). For me, this happens once a day and is very annoying. Please fix this bug. 

[ribezaz]

Hello how are you?

Welcome to the Spotify Community! I'm happy to have you here 🙂

It may be that a clean reinstall of your Spotify can solve your issue!

You can check out how to do this in this link:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/FAQs/Perform-a-clean-reinstall-of-the-app/ta-p/4746485

Keep me informed, so I can keep helping you!

Cheers
ribezaz

[techlover10]

In the hopes that some Spotify engineer sees this thread, here's a stack trace from connecting the Android debugger and triggering the crash.  No amount of reinstalling is going to fix this, it is clearly crashing when attempting to load the new list while also displaying the previous list.  Please, Spotify, it's been months!

[wonderboy3489]

Same thing going on here. Android app crashes the first time I navigate to the New Episodes feed. Updated, reinstalled, cleared memory/cache... nothing works. Please fix this!

[seigl]

100% of the time I open Spotify for the first time in a day, I go to New Episodes to look for podcast updates and the app crashes. Reopen it and it's fine. Not a big deal but annoying enough the past few months and still happening. Last updated a week ago.

Plan

Premium

Country

US

Device

Samsung Galaxy S21

Operating System

Android 14

[jzapin]

I'm having the same problem: initial open of new episodes crashes.  Subsequent is fine.

I have a Google pixel 8a.  

Very frustrating. 

[joeltine]

A clean install doesn't work. I've tried it. This is a broadly reported issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/truespotify/comments/1hbtr6b/podcasts_crashing_app/. The app always crashes when going to "New Episodes" in library the first app start of the day. It's extremely irritating.

[1219616124]

For me the app crashes every time I go to the New Episodes list for podcasts. 

[shamsundar]

 

Plan

Premium

Country

INDIA

Device

Windows personal computer

Operating System

Windows 11

My Question or Issue

i am not getting any new episodes of a podcast in spotify. using the link from my friend also does not work as the app throws an error. please sort this issue 

[fbertucci22]

This still happens for me only when I open the "New Episodes" podcast playlist.

[rrrow]

Same issue on Google Pixel Pro 9. Have tried clearing cache, and reinstalling with no resolution.

Every single time without fail, when opening the Spotify app for the first time in a while (seems to be about an hour or so, but haven't tested the exact timing), when I open the New Episodes playlist, it will crash.

It's gotten to the point where it is muscle memory to reopen the app immediately because it's been happening so consistently and for so long.

[Eni]

Hey folks, 

Thanks for all the info you've sent so far. 

Could you let us know if you're still experiencing this? If so, we suggest performing a clean reinstall of the app by following these specific steps to make sure you're running the latest version. 

Keep us posted on how it goes.

[techlover10]

Dare I say it...it looks like it's finally fixed in the latest update?!  I've opened up the new episodes page on a few different days and haven't had to reflexively reopen the app.  After so long I have a hard time believing my eyes, I really hope it is actually fixed though.  I didn't do a clean reinstall as they keep reminding us; at least on my phone, it seems like the latest update addresses it.

[Lavrentis0811]

The main problem seems fixed but the feed is still buggy:

• I scroll through it for a few pages
• find an episode I want to look at
• Click on it to see the details
• Then go back to the feed to continue my scrolling 

Expected: I am back in the middle of my feed where I had scrolled down to.

Reality:

It takes me to the very beginning of the feed and I have to scroll down from scratch again.

[techlover10]

Haha this sounds 100% like a lazy engineering fix, since it seems like this finally got fixed a few weeks after I posted my stack trace (not necessarily claiming credit but noting that it seemed weirdly coincidental) I'm gonna write another technical hypothesis here too: it sounds like whoever fixed this probably just forced a reload of the feed every time you open that page.  My best guess is that previously it was crashing because it was matching a stale cached UI feed against the updated feed info, so reloading constantly would prevent the crashing.  The problem with that is reloading the feed would lose its position in the UI element.  The easy solution to that would be to cache an index and ID of the currently visible podcast elements prior to navigating to the detail page, and then performing a fuzzy match against the updated list and setting the scroll position.  This should be doable off screen after the feed has been refreshed and before transitioning the screen, so that the user doesn't see a brief flicker.  In the event that the feed has changed since the last time the user viewed it (which is pretty unlikely) the feed could fall back on matching scroll position against whatever element(s) match, and jump to the beginning only if there is too much of a change which is something a user should almost never see.

C'mon Spotify engineering, you got this!