Help us improve Chromecast

[pompa]

Hi all,

I’m the Product Manager for the Big Screen Experience here at Spotify.

As you may have noticed, we have made a change recently in how the Chromecast app looks and performs.

Our main goal with this change was to rebuild the underlying infrastructure and logic to make it more performant and permit us to develop faster on the platform.

This also required us to overhaul the whole user interface. As you can see, it doesn’t look much today and our intent is to quickly learn and improve the experience.

We've already received a lot of feedback from you - the community. We would like to understand the feedback better which is why we’re opening up this thread to discuss with you directly on what could be improved and understand the why’s.

One of the things that we came across was that many people were missing previous and next song which was shown in the old design but isn’t anymore. Please let us know more how this was used and why it’s important for you.

Thanks.

[alan_grey]

Although I am probably adding nothing original at this point, I would like to add to those saying that biggest issues are the slow start time for tracks (very frustrating) and readability of text (I wrote some feedback on a separate topic a while ago: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Other-Partners-Windows-Phone-etc/Chromecast-New-on-TV-display-is-un...

One other thing - why display the next/previous UI buttons at all? I understand showing the stateful ones. These, however, seem to be vestigial. 

[Kinaite]

After the "update", its looks like more a downgrade, i have noticed so many problems:

Its stops and disconnect. So much delay when changing songs, its happening all the time.

I can't use it, its awful

[alan_grey]

I have to ask something. Your two stated goals with this update were to improve performance and enable faster development. Well, your update ruined performance (starting a track and seeking within a track takes up to ten seconds, reported by many within this thread) and you haven't been able to develop a fix in over a month. It seems that you haven't met your stated goals. And you've failed in both these things while also removing previous functionality. 

Do we get an apology? Or an update? Or at the very least, a reversion to the old, mostly working Chromecast app? 

[TomGarro]

I feel disappointed, I feel what you saying.

[matertera]

It no longer connects to chromecast and cannot play music on "the big screen" the updated app on the phone doestn work (MOTO android) or on the laptop (macbook air)

[wweiers]

What is your "political" problem with Chromecast ? Honestly, please. 

[halfisglassfull]

Hi there, Pompa. Thanks for taking the time to listen to user feedback. While I do care about the UI issues with the new interface, the most important thing for me is the listening experience. Please work on a fix for the tremendous gaps between tracks. Gapless playback would be ideal. I listen to a lot of live albums, and the long gaps are quite jarring.

[T-mo-T]

When is the UI coming back? 

Also the stability of casting seems to be downgraded since a few weeks... I have to completely close the spotify app before I can cast to my Chromecast again...

I understand it's probably a 'better technical implementation', but the users are not happy with these recent changes (downgrades).

Anyhow I'm still addicted to Spotify. 🙂

[AgentDrTran]

This is awful. Spotify doesn't update the current song correctly on my device, it takes longer to load, and the player is incredibly ugly. If I try to look at the current playing song on my Android, the TV will start flickering  between the song playing on the TV and the default spotify screen and sometimes playback will stop working. It's terrible.

[ptolo]

Same experience here... the new UI is a downgrade and Spotify often does not see my chromecast. I have to restart the app multiple times to get lucky... Please fix this soon as I'm already exploring competitive solutions, which seem to work way better than the new version of Spotify. Bring back the previous version!

[aloukissas]

Sadly, of all the Chromecast-enabled apps, Spotify is the one riddled with bugs, both UX and functional.

1. Biggest UX issue: to cast music, one needs to "play, hit pause, select chromecast, hit play again". In all other cast-enabled apps (TuneIn, Netflix, YouTube, etc), one has an option to switch to cast at any point (commonly in the upper-right part of the app).

2. Biggest functional issue: this is a relatively new one (roughly since beginning of 2017) - doing the whole "play-pause-cast-play", let's say on album X by artist Y, once connected to Chromecast and I hit play, Spotify decides to play album Z (curiously from the same album though).

It's pretty obvious that Chromecast support has secondary priority at Spotify (priority seems to be given to Spotify Connect enabled speakers and Apple TV). But it would be great to have Spotify at least be in parity with all other popular apps.

[abeijona]

This looks horrible. I don't know what you guys were thinking when you decided this would be an acceptable replacement. I don't even know what to say.

[joaodslourenco]

Since the update, besides missing the display of the previous and next songs, I've been experiencing some lags in chromecast. Sometimes, it makes it impossible to listen to a song, as it freezes many times for at least 5 seconds while playing. Please fix this. I've never had these problems before that update which changed the design.

[JGrobe]

For a time there, the app at least still worked. Now however, I can't even get Spotify to play anything at all on Chromecast. It connects, and the current song appears, but clicking play does absolutely nothing. The song looks to be playing on the app (the time is moving) but there is no change on the television and eventually, about 30 seconds after the initial connection, the whole thing just drops out and reverts back to the Chromecast home screen.

For reference, I am using an iPhone 7 with Spotfiy Premium, and (I believe) a Gen 2 Chromecast connected to a Philips television.

[user-removed]

It would be nice to have a more standard cast icon similar to other apps. The current method for connecting can be clunky as others have noted. Play, pause, cast. 

It would also be nice to be able to cast videos from the android app as well!

Thanks for all your work on this!

[Joe]

I'd love to know what the pressing reason was for taking something which worked fairly reliably for most of us and turn it into a piece of **bleep**.

I connect to my chromecast using my S8 and see somethiing remarkably like my android screen. None of the android controls work with chromecast now so I have to use my TV remote. Volume control doesn't work. Hitting Play on android starts the music playing on android to be mirrored on chromecast after a delay. Hitting Pause on android just pauses the music on my android.

You guys seem to be **bleep** bent on driving users away. I already have a Play Music account and, needless to say, casting works flawlessly.

[aloukissas]

Chromecast support is so low in Spotify's priority list, to the point that they don't even bother monitor and respond to paying user feedback.

It still remains the only chromecast-enabled app that doesn't work properly, including many free ones (TuneIn, SoundCloud, etc).

[francoivan]

Well, everything is pretty much said. 

- Better usage of the 16:9 TV screen ratio.

- Color, please!!! I can feel my happiness go away with that dark background.

- I don't really care if the Previous, Play and Next buttons are there (I actually like them), but seriously, When the track is PLAYING, there should be a PAUSE button (like if the interface was funtional). 

- Bigger fonts and Cover art. I'm using my glasses and it's already difficult to see.

- As someone said on a previous reply, please can you add some kind of movement? For us, with older TV's, the staticness tend to burn the pixels (or the gas, as on my living room PLASMA TV).

- Fix the reaction gap from the app and the chromecast.

And, now that we are talking about the chromecast support:

PLEASE MAKE IT WORK DIRECTLY FROM THE PC/MAC APP FROM THE CONNECT MENU.

Thanks for giving this space, and reading our comments for the first real time in... many years, actually.

[aloukissas]

Sadly, the Chromecast SDK isn't available for desktop apps - only for mobile (iOS/Android) and on the Chrome browser.

[isakb]

Thank you all for your feedback, we appreciate it. We are currently rolling out a small update to the UI, which hopefully takes care of some problems. More updates to follow.