Offline device limit problem...is it Amazon Dot??

[silo_portem]

UK user with iPhone 6s iOS 14.3 Premium plan

I have a premium account and there are currently only four devices that to my knowledge have downloads for listening offline...these are my iPhone, my two daughters’ phones and one of their laptops. They also both have Amazon Dot smart speakers, which they use to pair to Spotify. 

Even though there are only four devices with downloads, my phone sometimes says the offline device limit has been reached and it kicks off my downloads. I noticed that Premium is required for linking with Alexa on a Dot or Echo, so I’m wondering if my daughter’s two Dots count as offline devices buy can’t find confirmation of this anywhere!

It’s driving me nuts, esp since Spotify removed the option of controlling which offline devices you have. Is there any way of making my phone the “master” offline device so that my downloads are never booted off? I use my phone offline more than online, so if my daughters upload new playlists to their devices before I go back online, it becomes the first to have tracks deleted. How can I stop this??! 

[Mihail]

Hey @silo_portem,

Thanks for searching for the answer you need here.

The Amazon Dot devices shouldn't contribute to the offline device list. It's possible that the error you're experiencing is caused by a caching issue. We recommend you log out everywhere and run a clean reinstall on all devices you mention, this involves deleting the cache files of the app and will force a account wide resynchronization of your info. You can have a look at this guide for the steps relevant to each device.

It's also a good idea to unlink the Spotify account from the Alexa app and reinstall it as well. That way the connection between the two services will be build anew from the ground up. This page can help.

Hope you find this useful. Keep us posted how you get on.

[silo_portem]

Thanks so much for your reply! I’ll give it a try. I should have added that we also run Spotify on my MacBook Pro and iMac, and I used to have the same issue when my daughters would save playlists for offline listening on those, but I banned them from doing so and have gone through all the playlists to ensure they are not available offline, so didn’t mention it. Is it worth deleting and reinstalling Spotify on them too?

It’s a shame Spotify removed the “manage offline devices” option. Also wondering if it’s worth posting a suggestion of making one device the “master” so that it can’t be pushed off by other downloads on other machines. (Family subscription would obviously help, but money is too tight at the mo!)

Thanks

Simon

[Mihail]

Hey @silo_portem,

Thanks for getting back to us.

From what you're describing it seems more likely that your daughters are adding additional devices to the list and that's why this is happening. Just to make sure though, it's a good idea to run the clean reinstall on all devices you use to run the app.

Keep in mind that one account is intended to be used by only one person. That way they can keep track of all devices that are used for offline listening. You can however submit an idea about a "master" device on our Exchange.  You can learn how to do this here. That way other users can vote for it and it will be easier for us to track it's popularity.

Let us know if that helped. 

[silo_portem]

Yep, my suspicions entirely!! It’s just they swore blind that they haven’t been using the computers for offline listening, which they shouldn’t need to now they both have iPhones (but my youngest is a lying toe rag 😉 !!)

Thanks again

Simon