[Android][Other] Integration of Spotify and BMW Connected Drive - Android

[Daniel]

So this idea has been implemented for iOS, can we see some Android love please???

The Connected Drive app is available on the Google Pllay store but it's only showing integration with Twitter and some other parts of the phone, would love to see Spotify added to this!

BMW Connected

[TheFZA]

My BMW (3 Series from 2015) was in a workshop the last few days. My rental car for this time was a small Toyota Aygo. It's a shame to see how well Bluetooth Spotify worked there. Few clicks and i had a perfect connection with information about artists, title name and so on. It's a real shame for BMW.

[SvenH95]

Hello, when will it be possible to use Spotify in all other BMW series using Android ? Is there a timeline to fix this especially for all cars from BMW using the navigation system including the headunit HU-H as well known as NBT ? I'm looking forward to have some official statements for this. You can't believe how many people are interested in using Spotify in their car. Thanks a lot for the reply.

[atanch]

Strangely Spotify has been working perfectly in the last 3 days for me. I have a 2018 1 series F20 and a HTC 10.

All I could remember what happened just before this happened was...
- Upgrade Spotify to latest version in Google Playstore

- Upgrade to Android 8

- Enabled Developer options, and choose AVRCP 1.5 for Bluetooth

I'm hoping this will help someone, and not cause it to break my currently working setup.

[dtvuk]

please provide screenshot of your car display showing spotify app.

[Omibus]

With newer cars and apps over Bluetooth its working but playback breaks up after a few minutes. A Screenshot is no proof for a stable playback. Its still not and will never be working over USB i guess.

[atanch]

Since i took delivery of the car 2 months back, I have struggled with it like the rest.

Yes, photos will not be proof of a stable playback, unfortunately when I tried to take a video, the playback stops automatically. As luck would have it, it crashed while I tried to take more photos, after I got into the garage back home, after a good 48 mins drive.

Deactivated Apps in Manage mobile devices, activated it, and it connected back again. Lets hope it was the phone that was acting up that caused it, because it was working just fine. Do apologise for the order of the photos.

Last photo, before it crashed, after 48 mins...

Next song...

Just got back home...

browsing...

still going strong after 29 mins...

Car just started at work

[atanch]

Oh, and its not 100% perfect. The song info (i.e. title, artist, album) is mostly jumbled up. And if you scroll the playlist on your steering wheel, it still shows duplicate on the first song, like before, and you have to choose the song before the one, which you actually want to play.

[Mikecom32]

I have a 2018 M4, running NBT Evo on iDrive 6. I can dump all the version info out if it's useful.

Spotify integration has been spotty for me. The biggest issues I've run into are:

• Spotify randomly disconnects and disappears from the list of sources. Bluetooth is still connected and if I switch over to standard bluetooth, it continues playing fine.
• The progress bar for the currently playing song jumps around like mad
• Using the steering wheel controls to change songs in the heads up display shows the first song twice and then what is in the rest of the playlist. Choosing a song seems to make Spotify switch to a random song, not what was selected.

These are all Spotify issues judging by the fact that other apps seem to integrate just fine.

I tried to get my hands on the BMW Apps SDK to see what might be causing the issue, but BMW seems to only provide this to large companies, since they also apparently supply an iDrive dev unit. 

If there are any spotify devs reading this, you're welcome to reach out to me if you need a test car. I'm happy to sign an NDA and work to test beta code all you'd like. 

[Mikecom32]

@spudhead001 It's not BMW, it's Spotify that is the issue. BMW released something called a Software Development Kit (SDK) for BMW Apps integrations. This is essentially a bunch of documentation on what to send the car and (usually) some example code.

Companies like Spotify, Pandora, Yelp, and others take this big chunk of documentation and customize their app to send and recieve data to/from the car to display and control things.

If the issues everyone is having were widespread across all apps (Pandora, Spotify ,etc.) and phones (iOS and Android), then you could easily point the finger at BMW. Since other apps work fine, and even the iOS Spotify app works fine, it comes down to a bug and/or missing feature from the Android version of Spotify. 

While the older iDrive systems (4) might not be fixable, the latest versions (maybe 5, but definitely iDrive 6) should be completely fixable.

[dtvuk]

mike also check this out. cold start the car after disabling idrive bluetooth.

Then turn on your android phone that has bluetooth set to off.

Then plugin to the car's usb port. Then load connected drive followed by spotify but don't play anything just yet - just make sure spotify is logged in and sitting on a track.

Now navigate to sources or bmw apps in idrive and look for spotify. May take a while to appear.

The usb method is difficult to attain but once you have it, its great. Proves the functionality in idrive is there.. but spotify implementation is possibly broken.