Plan
Premium
Country
United States
Device
Galaxy S21, Galaxy Tab S8
Operating System
Android 13
My Question or Issue
On Samsung Galaxy devices (my phone and tablet), your earbuds have the ability to switch back and forth between devices depending on what media is playing. This is great if you're listening to music on your phone and want to watch a video on your tablet, for instance. Your earbuds will switch to the tablet, and then when you push play on your phone, it switches back to your music.
The problem with this behavior is that, for some reason, Spotify will have your headphones switch when the app is opened, not when the play button is pushed. So, let's say you're listening to music on your phone and decide to use the connected devices feature to change your music while working on something on your tablet. You used to be able to open the spotify app and change your music using your tablet, and your phone would change which music it was playing. Now when you open the spotify app, it switches your earbuds to your tablet and pauses your music. If you try to reconnect the earbuds to the right device (using the prompt that appears at the top when your earbuds switch), in what I can only describe as a fight between the two spotify apps, your earbuds rapidly switch back and forth between the two devices until one gives up. Music will then resume on one of the devices randomly, with or without earbuds connected. This will persist as long as the spotify app is open on both devices. So, you can no longer use your tablet to control music on your phone, or your phone to control music on your tablet. You can only have the app open on one device at a time. This defeats one of the main purposes of the connected devices feature. (As a side note, I'm not expecting a mod to resolve this. This issue has persisted through several app updates and software updates, as well as factory resets and uninstall/reinstall. It will need to be fixed at the software level.)
This is a Spotify issue, not a hardware issue. Youtube, for example, only switches your headphones when you push play on a video with the app open on both devices. It waits for you to directly tell the app that you want to start watching a video on a different device. It also tells the previous device to pause, which is nice. It's what the auto-switching is intended for. Spotify, however, assumes opening the app isn't to browse, read lyrics, or change playlists without pulling my phone out of my pocket. It assumes I want to switch which device is listening to music.
The annoying thing is this could be solved with a simple prompt when opening the app. Imagine a pop-up when you open the app on your tablet while listening on your phone:
"You're currently listening on xxx's phone, would you like to switch to this device?"
"Switch to xxx's tablet"
"Not now"
Just like the pop-up for car mode. Easy fix, and then wait to switch the headphones until you hit switch to this device, otherwise, keep them connected to the current device.
And if your earbuds are connected to your tablet without Spotify open or playing, and then you open it on your phone, wait until you start playing a song to switch the earbuds over to your phone. That way if I'm watching a youtube video and want to finish it before starting a song, I can open Spotify and pick my song without switching my headphones to my phone and stopping my video. Thanks!
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random