Help Needed: Spotify Device Not Available When App or Tab Is Closed

[Runjunkumar]

Hi everyone,

We are a home and hotel automation company. We’ve recently introduced a feature where users can control their room ambiance using predefined scenes such as "Party Scene", "Morning Scene", and so on. When a user activates a scene like "Party Scene", our system automatically adjusts the lights and starts playing a Spotify playlist selected by the user.

We have successfully integrated the Spotify Web API and can control music playback. However, we’re facing a serious issue:

If the user closes the Spotify app or browser tab (in the case of Web Playback SDK), we get a "device not available" error. As a result, only the lights respond to the scene, but the music does not play. This breaks the experience and leaves users disappointed.

We are looking for a solution to handle this gracefully on both the frontend and backend. Ideally, we want to:

1. Detect when no active device is available.

2. Automatically switch to or prompt the user to open a valid device.

3. Ensure the experience is seamless with minimal user effort.

If anyone has faced a similar situation or has any suggestions, we would really appreciate your help.

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,
Runjun kumar

[Ximzend]

Hi @Runjunkumar 

Thank you for posting in the Spotify Community, and Welcome!

You wrote your app also targets hotels. Be aware that it is prohibited to use Spotify in a business setting.

Instead, business should use Soundtrack.

Soundtrack can import Spotify playlists, and has its own API.

Let me know how it goes!