The "add to this playlist" interface often hangs after adding a song from search

[Metallicity]

Plan

Premium

Country

US

Device

Pixel 7 Pro

Operating System

Android 14

My Question or Issue

I usually manage playlists from my computer, or else will add things already in Liked Songs, but this past week I tried making a larger playlist using my phone of songs that I listened to prior to using Spotify. This meant a lot of searching, and annoyingly a lot of searches automatically exiting after adding a single song, made worse by the fact that the app then decides to load new song suggestions every single time a song is adding via search, and then eventually it doesn't even get that right and just spins forever trying to load the next set of suggested songs from the same album/artist (i.e., exactly where I already was and the app had already successfully loaded before it kicked me out of the search view). This would be incredibly annoying to use even if it worked exactly as designed, but as-is I basically have to quit the app and start from scratch after every 3-4 searches or so.

[Joan]

Hi there @Metallicity,

Thanks for reaching out. We'll be glad to assist you in troubleshooting this issue. Could you please provide us the following:

• Is this on all devices or only on that Android phone?
• When did this start happening?
• Does this happen with all searches within the app?
• Does this happen with all playlists?
• A video of the behaviour. If the files are too large to attach here in the Community, you can send them to us via Google Drive or as unlisted YouTube videos.

With this information, we’d be happy to investigate.

Keep us posted.

[Metallicity]

I added a demonstration video to the original post. The steps to reproduce seem pretty simple though, create a new playlist, tap "add to this playlist", then use the search bar to add songs (suggestions do not reload when simply adding songs from the suggestion lists). As more songs are added from search, new suggestion lists will populate, which seem to impact the load time (or render time) of further suggestions, but this might just be coincidence. Note the example was using all songs from the same artist, but in practice each new song can create two additional sections for the album and artist, as well as refreshing the individual "similar to this song" section.

As stated previously, I never encountered this issue on desktop (where the "add to this playlist" UI is unnecessary due to simply being able to drag songs directly onto playlists), and haven't used search extensively to add to playlists in this way on Android previously. So I can't say how long it's been like this (or if it affects iOS as well).

[Susan_GP]

Hi there @Metallicity,

Thanks for your reply and the info provided.

I took the time to do this from my account, and I didn't encounter any issues. Yes, every time you add a song to the playlist, the app will make a new suggestion list based on that song. It doesn't matter if it's from the same artist. The suggestions are updated every time. However, the app never got stuck in the loading screen, nor I had any issues while searching and adding songs to the playlists.

As this is happening only from your phone, we'd suggest performing a clean reinstall of the Spotify app with these steps. No worries, you won't lose any content, but you might need to download your offline music again. If that doesn't help, could you check with a different internet connection? If you're using mobile data, try with Wi-Fi, or vice-versa. 

Lastly, and to check if this can be account-related, could you try logging in with a different account and replicate the behavior there? If you don't have another account, you can ask a relative or friend to log in with their account just to check.

We'll keep an eye out for your reply.

[Metallicity]

I've further isolated the issue. Adding songs does not matter, any time the search screen is exited, the "add to this playlist" UI will show a loading screen before displaying the same suggestions again. Despite nothing changing, every subsequent enter and exit takes exponentially longer than the previous one. This is not an exaggeration, what starts as a 1-2 second operation quickly slows to a 15 second one, then a 40 second one, and then for the final iteration before giving up, I had it hang for 5+ minutes of uninterrupted spinning. If in testing this, the search (which is populated by previous results, in case that matters) can be successfully entered and exited ~30 times in a row without noticeable slow down in response times, I'd believe it might be an issue more specific to the device or account. But it clearly isn't just a matter of the device lacking resources, or having a slow internet connection. I've observed this same steady growth in delay times on over half a dozen test playlists now. And once, when simply opening and closing the search UI as fast as I could for a completely empty playlist, the entire app crashed under the load of having to switch between two different screens (but this unfortunately also destroyed the screen recording in the process).

Video Timestamps:

00:01 - first load

00:04 - second load

00:07 - third load

00:09 - fourth load

00:11 - fifth load

00:13 - sixth load

00:16 - seventh load

00:20 - eighth load

00:26 - ninth load

00:41 - tenth load

01:16 - eleventh load

03:15 - twelveth load (I believe it then continues through the remainder of the 10 minute runtime without finishing, but feel free to watch through to confirm this if there are any doubts)

[Joan]

Hi @Metallicity,

Thanks for the detailed reply and the video. This will greatly help us investigate this. To be sure we've covered our bases though, please confirm that you've tried the troubleshooting steps provided by @Susan_GP.  

Let us know how it goes.

[Metallicity]

I followed the instructions to clear all app data and perform a fresh install of Spotify, and was still able to produce the same crashing and hanging behaviors. This is despite not playing, downloading, or searching for any song after first logging into my account.

At around two dozen exits/enters of the "add to playlists" search view, performance notably degraded with the UI growing less responsive, before crashing soon after. I was also able to get exponentially increasing load times by instead adding songs rather than simply entering/exiting, but it's hard to give any consistent rules for how to achieve one or the other, when most of my previous attempts to reproduce the issues were on a non-fresh install and technically an older version of the app (even if no relevant changes might have happened in between).

But again, the crashing issues are actually less annoying than just how long it takes to load after every single song. I just thought it seemed like a clearer issue that might be more urgent to fix, compared to hard-to-quantify performance issues and poor user experience.

[MihailY]

Hey @Metallicity,

Thank you for the additional info and apologies for the late reply.

To further narrow this down, can you try reproducing it with your account on another Android device (different brand if possible) and on your Pixel phone with another account (preferably one that has roughly the same amount of content saved in it)? 

No need for detailed info on loading times as we're just trying to find the general direction for further troubleshooting.

Keep us posted.