Spotify Responding Incredibly Slow on Many OnePlus X Android Phones

[Kevin1a]

Hello, I wanted to bring to light a bug many OPX users seem to be experiencing.  When using Spotify, weather I'm on Wifi or mobile data, I experience a ton of slowness when navigating the app.  The app also loses track of the SD card from time to time and warns me that it cannot find storage despite there being plenty of availible storage and a perfectly functional card.  Once I get music playing, it usually plays okay, but if I attempt to skip tracks or click on a different track, it sometimes just keeps playing the current song, or it stops altogether.  Here are a few quick device-specific reviews from Google Play addressing the issue:

"Slow! The app takes way too long to load. Somtimes 10 seconds or more to just load the interface!? Even if on offline mode? Please fix I have been a paying customer for over 3 years now. "

"Problems with app Getting further disappointed. Now if I restart my phone (I store Spotify in the SD Card) it fails to locate the storage,everything else that's on the storage card works fantastic. Disappointing Spotify"

"0 Stars Constant issues with changing the storage to SD card and when it does work the app is horribly slow with black screens and long loading times. Installed on my one plus x and its really awful. Will be unsubscribing."

"Super buggy Keeps crashing or just stopping functioning. Has restarted my phone, multiple times. It's been doing this for about a month, and it's really getting annoying. Everything takes forever to load, over both LTE and WiFi. These recurring problems are making enjoying using the app very difficult. I like the new features, but the old version worked better. That's more important to me, that it just works."

You get the idea.  Now I'm probably not going anywhere, because I can't stand the interface of Google Play Music, but I would really like to be able to use Spotify on my mobile phone again.  I initially confirmed the bug on the stock lollipop rom, and installed a custom marshmallow firmware in the futile hope that improved handling of SD cards might have a positive effect on the bug. 

Here's what I'm willing to do to help figure this out:

1. I'm willing to pull any logs or install any potential fixes provided by Spotify.  I'm a moderately advanced user, somewhat familiar with ADB and such, so if you tell me what log files you need, I will happily pull them.
2. I'm semi-active on the oneplus forums.  If you think the problem has something to do with them, I can try to get you in touch with someone knowledgable about the device itself over there.

3. I'd be happy to record a video of the behavior I'm experiencing on my phone and share it with you.

Please let me know how I can help.

Device: OnePlus X

Rom: stock lollipop; custom marshmallow
Carrier: T-Mobile (USA)
App has access to all permissions and data.  App is located in the main storage (no option to move it in Marshmallow), however, I think I tried it on both Internal and SD storage when I was running Lollipop.

[Carppopotamus]

Same issues minus the losing track of SD card...for now at least. Everything is SOOOO SLOW even simple non-music playing related things like loading of the Settings page. I feel this has become progressively worse over the last few updates and now basically unbearable since deciding to upgrade to Spotify Premium last night. Really questioning my decision to upgrade, only did it because of the promotional $9.99/3 months...Looks like they got me good!

Please fix EVERYTHING, thanks!

Device: HTC 10

OS: stock marshmallow 

Carrier: Verizon but mostly use WiFi

[Kevin1a]

So, a little bit of an update. I tried setting the storage to "Device Storage" instead of "SD Card" and it seems to have had a positive effect on the load speeds; however, this is not an acceptable solution. I suppose this bug could be considered triaged (the duct tape/bubble gum kind of fix no-one likes) but I'd like to keep talking about it in the hopes that we can identify the root cause.

My latest theory, after discovering the storage change speeds things up a bit is that because my SD card is 125 gb is that Spotify might be struggling with the size of the card.  Is anyone else using a slightly larger card like this?  My fathers Jeep Cherokee has a USB plugin that takes thumbdrives full of music, but if he puts anything larger than 64 gigs or so in it, it takes an eternity to search and index the storage every time the car starts up.  Could something similar be happening with my One Plus X?  Perhaps Spotify just isn't set up to handle that kind of storage space becuase of the way it handles it's own databases and cached data.

[Kevin1a]

Hey Carppopotamus, thanks for the reply.  I had a little success in finding a workaround for the bug (see my other reply for that), but I would be curious to know how large your SD card is, and if you don't have an SD, how large your built-in storage is?

[Carppopotamus]

I have a 64GB SD card...Oh I see what you did here, you're a size matters type of guy. 🙂 

By the way, I think a lot of my lag issues have gone away. Not really sure how or why, I did completely uninstall Spotify and delete all associated data from my SD card and reinstalled everything. Who knows...still a bit sluggish but definitely better. 

Jokes aside...size of a SD card does NOT matter for speed, what DOES matter with SD cards is the cards speed class and the read speed capability of the device using the card. So two things together. Oh and my phone has only 32GB of internal storage which doesn't matter with all this. 

Back to what matters...you'll want to check out this site as it has SD card speed class breakdowns and charts. 

My phone supports UHS-1 cards, the phone would be able to handle a UHS-3 card but wouldn't get the full speed benefit. Because of this I purchased a 64GB UHS-1 class card which I figured would maximize my processing speed since I like to keep a lot of apps/data on my external storage. 

So I would check to see what speed your phone supports and what the speed is of your SD card. One of the two may not be fully compatible with the other. Do you have an older SD card? If yes, that may be the issue right there. I had a very old card and it was Speed Class 2 so I upgraded for my new phone. 

Ok now on to one other thing you'll want to check, this is Marshmallow specific because it's a new feature. With Marshmallow you now have the option to 'adopt' your external storage (SD card) and make it appear as though it's 'Internal Storage'. I chose not to do this for a few reasons...

1. Once you do this your primary storage becomes your newly 'adopted' SD card
2. Your SD card is not readable by other devices
3. The real kicker is that if you 'adopt' the SD card and do NOT have a UHS-1 class card or above, performance will likely be 10x slower than regular internal storage.

Here's the link explaining all this. 

Hope this stuff helps and sorry for such a long winded response.