Plan Premium
Country UK
Device Pocophone F1
Operating System Android 10
Hi,
Periodically Spotify 'loses' most or all of my downloads. I run Spotify Premium on a Pocophone F1 on Android 10, with the app and downloads saved to my SD card. The files are still there on the SD card, but Spotify no longer recognises them and they don't show in my library (showing with an empty circle and down arrow symbol instead of the green infilled circle for downloaded). Spotify then automatically starts downloading the whole lot onto my already almost full SD card. The only way to stop it is to delete all the data in the app, delete the Spotify folder on the SD Card, uninstall the app and reinstall, then download everything again.
It used to do this every 9-12 months, which was irritating but I could just about live with. However it's getting increasingly more frequent, and has just happened twice in one week. I've just used up my entire mobile data allowance re-downloading, and it's then lost everything again after 4 days.
I've contacted Spotify Live Chat many times about this problem over the years. Their "support" extends only to telling me to uninstall and reinstall the app and hope that it doesn't happen again, which it always does. As soon as the Spotify staff realise it's more complicated than that, they usually disconnect the Live Chat. They are consistently disinterested and unwilling to escalate the problem to their technical team, and some are downright rude. When I complained to one worker that they were not attempting to solve the problem, they threatened to delete my entire account so I would lose my library and playlists. It's pointless contacting their Customer Support anyway as they never know what to do, and I can't take the risk of malicious staff deleting my account.
Googling this problem, I've found dozens of threads reporting this problem over the past 11+ years, usually ending with the poster deciding that they need to move to another streaming service as Spotify know all about the problem but refuse to offer any real solutions. The only other solution I've read is to root the phone and disable Spotify from startup, but that is beyond my technical skill, poses security risks, and requires access to a PC which I don't have.
Surely there must be some way to get the Spotify app to recognise that it's already downloaded those files? Has anyone found a way to do this?
I'm posting this out of desperation, in the hope that someone out there has found a solution to this long-running problem. I live in a rural area with very poor mobile signal and WiFi, so Spotify is off little use to me without the functionality of downloads.
