Release Radar/Discover Weekly songs hidden via phone do not appear hidden on desktop app

[densik]

Plan

Premium

Country

Canada

Device

Samsung Galaxy S21 FE/Windows Desktop

Operating System

Android 12/Windows 11

My Question or Issue

There is a bug with this scenario: I hide songs in my release radar or discover weekly playlists on my phone, then try to view the same playlist on my desktop. In the past the songs that were hidden via my phone used to appear on the desktop app as greyed out, and I had the ability to unhide them, just like on the phone app.

Recently (a few weeks or since a month ago) they are NOT grayed out on the desktop app, and appear to be playable, but upon clicking play I get a toast on the bottom that says "We can't play this until you allow this track in the Spotify phone app". On the web player, the issue is the same, but clicking the track does nothing at all with no error message whatsoever... This makes it very annoying and cumbersome to figure out which tracks are hidden and which are not. I have to click through numerous tracks to figure out where I left off. Please get this fixed to how it was working back a few weeks/one month ago.

[Alex]

Hi there @densik,

Thanks for reporting this behavior.

Can you let us know the following info:

• Desktop OS version and Spotify version
• Mobile model, OS version and Spotify version

This will help us in the investigation 🙂

Cheers.

[_mv]

Hey.

I've got the exact same issue. It's been going on for quite a while now (several months). The issue happens between the desktop (Windows in my case) or web clients (Chrome in my case) and mobile app clients (iOS in my case). The issue persists across Windows machines and clients (e.g., web clients).

iOS is the latest version (15.5) with latest Spotify app (8.7.38.1353) as of 15 June 2022. Windows apps are also the latest versions, however as mentioned the issue persists even on the Spotify web client.

My two photos below a case where I hid a song on the iOS client but which isn't displaying as "hidden" in the desktop/Windows client.

[_mv]

To add to the above. Another example within the same Discover Weekly playlist where some songs ("Destination" and "Blood Walk") were hidden on the iOS client and did carry over to the web/desktop client.

[Kiril · Accepted solution]

Hey @_mv, got it!

And we actually are able to reproduce this and is something that has been on the radar for a while now. As you see, it's a bit hit and miss and sometimes it works and sometimes it fails to sync up.

There're several technical reasons for that, but the gist of the issue is that the mobile and desktop apps are quite different in their inner workings and the sync between them is done via a bit of a hack-around. We've done our best to optimize the actual playback preference to carry over, but the visual part of it is indeed not as good as it could be. At the moment unfortunately, there's not much that can be done without a major overhaul of the background processes involved. 

[_mv]

Thanks for being up front and honest about it. I hope it gets fixed someday for us that use both the mobile and desktop apps daily!

[OscarDC]

Hey @_mv,

Thank you for keeping in contact. 

We appreciate the time you took following the troubleshooting process, for your patience and understanding as well. We hope to have this resolved for all users.

If you have any additional questions, don't hesitate to ask.