Bad iOS App performance

[foobar42]

The general performance of the iOS Spotify application is unacceptably bad in my opinon. I planed to use my old iPhone 4 as Spotify player only at home, but there is not a chance to start a song in under a minute of waiting for the application to respond. Well its an old phone, but theres a huge number of people still using it. Mine has been reseted, theres noting installed except for spotify, every iOS feature deactivated, flight mode, playing only downloaded songs in low quality. If you are patient enough to wait for the app to let you select a song it will pauses every two seconds. 

The iPhone 4 came out 6 years ago so maybe support for it has just stopped, but the same issues started do appear on my iPhone 6s too.

Is there anything that can be done to improve the app performence? Is there a way to downgrade to previous versions? 

[mrgsteele · Accepted solution]

It sounds like you've done just about everything there is to try and get better performance out of your phone and the app. It's just one of the perils of ever-changing technology, I'm afraid.

There is a way to downgrade to a previous version of the iOS app but it's not an easy process and there's a risk that the app won't perform as expected (after all they update the app for a reason). Here's a link to the guide on how to do that if you want to try it.

[foobar42]

Thank you for that suggestion. Indeed the linked workflow did the trick for me. 

I can encurage anyone to try this if you are facing the same issue. It worked without any problems, just make sure to backup your iPhone first, just in case. The workflow is pretty strait forward and could be done by anyone.

Here are the versions I tried

814791851  => 4.5.0 after a few seconds no more gaps during audio playback, performance almost acceptable when just playing music and not performing any other tasks like searching for other tracks

810784638 = > 2.1.0  This one worked out for me. The UI stutters but is usable with little frustration. Gapeless playback in extreme quality setting. Changing tracks takes less than a second. Playback continues when performing a search simultaneously.

The above applies to an iPhone 4 32GB running nothing but the Spotify App over wifi. All known performance tweaks for iOS applied.

After all the old iPhone had find its place as a good quality music reciever. 

[mrgsteele]

Excellent! 😃

Make sure you turn off automatic app updates on your phone so it doesn't get overwritten with the latest version again.