Why aren't downloaded podcast episodes accessible when my phone goes offline?

[OthatD27]

Plan

Free

Country

India

Device

Samsung Galaxy M30s

Operating System

(Android 10)

My Question or Issue

As the title mentions, why don't my downloaded podcast episodes stay for offline usage after I download them? I have experienced this several times where I download an episode so that I can listen to it offline only to see that I cannot access or play it when my phone goes offline. Do I need a Premium plan to be able to listen to podcasts offline? I know I cannot download songs for offline play with a Free plan but I thought podcasts were included.

Please help and thank you.

[Eni]

Hey there @OthatD27, 

Welcome to the Community and thanks for getting in touch about this 🙂 

You should be able to listen to your downloaded podcasts with the free service. 

In this case, it's well worth running a clean reinstall, as it's more thorough than a normal one to get rid of any cached files that might be causing trouble.

If this doesn't do the trick, could you send us a screenshot of how you're seeing your downloaded podcasts in the app?

We'll be waiting for your reply!

[OthatD27]

So I tried the clean reinstall procedure and my problem hasn't been resolved. 

What I'm seeing is, everytime I download a podcast episode for offline use and then I turn off my WiFi connection to play it, it becomes unavailable. I'm also experiencing a thing where Spotify will redownload an unplayed episode everytime I turn the WiFi on. So the episode won't be available for offline play but it'll download when I turn the WiFi on. Shouldn't downloaded episodes stay downloaded for offline play? Hope you can help. I've attached a screenshot that shows how my downloaded episodes look when my phone is offline. I cannot play these episodes as it shows an error exclamation point.

Thank you. 

[Mihail]

Hey @OthatD27,

Thanks for keeping us in the loop.

Could you let us know if the exclamation mark is there next to your downloaded episodes when phone is online? If it's an option, it would be helpful if you could download the episodes anew with a different network. That way can test for network issues.

One more thing - do the downloads play correctly when the app manually set in offline mode? You can learn how to do this here.

Keep us posted. We'll keep an eye out for your reply.

[OthatD27]

Hello! Thanks for the reply.

So I tried downloading from a different network and I'm still facing the same problem. For instance, I will download a podcast episode at say 1 pm today. It'll stay in my downloads, in both offline and online mode and will be playable offline until the end of the day. The next day at 11 am, when I try to play it in offline mode, it won't be available (i.e. grayed out) When I connect to a network, it will redownload that episode and I guess I will be able to play it offline for another day. 

I'm not sure if this is some automatic cache cleaning process or something else, but how I can make sure that my downloaded podcasts stay downloaded and available for offline play until I delete them and not just for a day? If it helps, my current storage location is the device storage and not my SD card. Should I switch my podcast storage location to my SD card instead? 

Thanks for the replies and hope you can help. 

Ojus

P.S. I've attached a screenshot that shows the podcast being downloaded when I have connected to a network and have opened Spotify

[Mihail · Accepted solution]

Hey @OthatD27,

Thanks for getting back to us.

Is it possible that there are some storage/ cache clearing apps on your phone? It would seem like the downloads get removed according to a daily schedule. Keep in mind that some model have them preinstalled. If you find any, make sure to disable them or add Spotify as an exception.

We would also like to check the SD card for interferences with the app. Could you remove it, restart the device, clean reinstall the app once more and see if afterwards this behavior continues? We'd also appreciate it if you share the free storage available on your phone after your downloads are available for offline listening

We recommend that you also have a look for available updates for your OS.

Let us know if that helped. 

[OthatD27]

Hello

Thank you for the reply. What I did was turn off my daily storage cleaning option in my settings like you said. I also discovered that my default podcast storage location was my internal storage and not my SD card. So I switched my storage location in Spotify to my SD card and that seems to have solved the issue. I don't think my phone's storage cleaning affects my SD card so I can even turn that on and my podcasts do stay downloaded for offline play. 

Thank you so much for the regular and consistent replies to this thread and for helping me resolve this issue. I have marked the latest answer as a solution.

[Mihail]

Hey @OthatD27,

Thanks for keeping us in the loop.

We're happy to hear the issue got resolved for you.

Don't hesitate to let us know if you have any further questions.

Cheers!