tvOS/Apple TV app scrubbing/FF/RW not possible

[sweyers]

It seems that it is impossible to scrub around (in other words, fast forward or rewind) in songs in the tvOS/Apple TV app. Maybe I just don’t know how to do this, but all of the other clients I use for various platforms have this feature. One of them, Roku, stops the cursor on the slider bar between the play/pause and shuffle/like set of buttons. The tvOS and Roku client also visually look fairly similar due to both being TV based. So what gives Spotify? Is this a bug? Will this be fixed?

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

Apple TV 4K

Operating System

tvOS 13.3.1

[nicholascornish]

This is an essential feature, especially for scrubbing through longer items (dj mixes, podcasts, etc) and surprising that it's not present by default. 

[Alex]

Hi there folks,

Thanks for reaching out about this.

Have you tried reinstalling the Spotify app on your TVs? This will assure you're running the latest version of the app.

Also, could you tell us if this is something that started happening recently or as long as the Apple TV app has been live? 

We'll be on the lookout for your replies. Don't hesitate to reach out again if you have more questions.

[nicholascornish]

I have not seen this feature before (the ability to use the Apple TV remote's touchpad to swipe horizontally and scrub through a track's timeline). 

I'm using the version beginning with: "2020.11.02_2a98dd1a release ...", which looks like November 2020 to me.

It's possible to scrub a video in Youtube, Netflix, Red Bull TV on AppleTV. It's possible to scrub music tracks in iTunes on AppleTV.

It really feels like this functionality should be standard for any app on the Apple TV. That it's not there for Spotify makes the user experience unfortunately less than ideal.

[sweyers]

Can confirm upon testing just now that this functionality is still absent. I don’t remember it ever being there either during the time I’ve had my Apple TV. It’s to the point where I just use a different platform to listen through my TV because of this extremely basic missing function, which is a shame because it’s otherwise a pretty nice app

[nicholascornish]

Interestingly, it is possible to scrub a track using Spotify Connect (e.g AppleTV Spotify controlled via a Phone/Tablet using the same Spotify account).

While this is a workaround, the AppleTV experience is really based around the idea of a dedicated touchpad remote, and not using a Phone as a remote (e.g. Chromecast).