Has Offline Downloading changed recently?

[Craigski]

In the last week something seems to have changed for me.

If I do the following:

• set a playlist to 'available offline'. 
• streaming quality set to automatic
• download quality set to extreme
• 'download using cellular' set to off.

Until just recently, if I streamed a song over cellular from that playlist which HAD NOT yet been downloaded, it would stream at a lower quality.  Later when I connected to wifi, the same song would be downloaded automatically at extreme quality. Which is what I expected to happen.

But yesterday I noticed that when I streamed my Discover Weekly playlist over cellular, which HAD NOT YET been downloaded, the downloaded arrow icon appeared next to each song as it finished playing.  And my data usage for that day was HUGE.  It appeared it downloaded and saved each song at extreme quality over cellular as I played it.

I'm sure it didn't do this before the last update?

[jean3601]

Hey @Craigski

It looks like you set streaming quality to automatic, this means that it can use any quality, I suggest turning streaming to the desired quality to ensure you don't have huge cellular data usage 🙂

[Craigski]

Thanks for your reply.

But I still think something is badly broken.  My usage only jumped up to insane levels in the last week.  My usage of Spotify, and the network I'm on, has not changed.

I've always had my streaming set to automatic.  Last year when I checked on a 4G network this was only using 50-60Mb when streaming for an hour.  Yesterday when I checked after being notified of higher than normal usage it had jumped up to 190-200MB for an hour.

Taking your advice I tried moving it from Automatic to Normal.  I then reset my cellular stats.

So here are my settings now.

• Stream Quality -> Normal
• Download Quality -> Extreme
• Download Using Cellular -> Off

Here is what happened.

• I made sure I was on 4G. 
• I selected a playlist I've never played before. 
• Set it to Available Offline. 
• Played one song from the list. 
• When it finished playing, a downloaded icon appeared next to it. (I've never noticed this happening unless I've downloaded on wifi) 
• I stopped Spotify from playing.
• I Checked the cellular stats.  It was at 43MB, which is really high for a single song.
• I then went back to Spotify to discover that the playlist now had a bunch of other songs downloaded.  Even though the settings were set to only download over wifi. 
• Double checked that at the top of the list was a message "Waiting for WiFi".
• Went back to stats.  It was now at 154MB.

So even though my streaming is set to 'Normal' and my 'Download Using Cellular" is disabled, Spotify appears to be downloading and storing my tracks at extreme when I'm streaming over 4G. 

I've just checked again before hitting post and it's at 302MB.  Even though I only played one song and stopped.

I'm removing the app till I find out more.  I'm not on unlimited data.  Spotify has used more in the last few days then I used for the entire of last month.  Thank goodness my ISP sent an automated warning message.

[jean3601]

@Craigski

Okay, Let's try some troubleshooting:

I suggest you try a clean reinstall and see if this helps, This usually fixes most problems 🙂

Note: This will remove any saved offline tracks and cache 🙂 

Does this solve the issue?

[Craigski]

I actually did that tonight so I could take some screen captures to send to support.

No, it didn't fix it.  The problems continued as I described them.

There were only one difference I noticed when I reinstalled.

When it was fresh, with nothing marked as being available offline, it worked fine.  Data usage was back to normal.

It was only after I marked a playlist to be made available offline that things went crazy.

As mentioned in the previous post, if I:

• Went to 4G
• Set Download using Cellular to NO
• Set a playlist to "Available Offline"

I would get a message saying "Waiting for WiFi....".  If I then streamed something from the playlist it would randomly download other songs on the playlist.  there would be no indication they were downloading.  It was only when a song finished, or you left and returned to the page that the downloaded arrow would appear on random songs.

Cellular Data usage was huge when it did this.

Once I had marked a playlist to be available offline, spotify seemed to constantly be downloading something, even when it was paused.  According to the time visible in my screen shots, I had it open for 1 1/2 hours while I took the screenshots and documented all the steps for what I was doing.  In all that time I only played 5 songs in total.  The rest of the time it was paused.  The final tally in the Cellular Stats for Spotify was nearly 800MB.

I uninstalled it again after that.  I've noticed a couple of posts here about high usage.  I'm hoping it's a bug in the last update and there is a fix coming in.  It started going screwey for me after the last update.

[balphius]

I've completed similar troubleshooting (check streaming quality, reinstall, etc.) and had the same issues.

The seems to have been occuring in the past couple weeks at best, but my carrier doesn't really give me a great idea of when it started to spike so it's hard to know.

I've only played from saved lists today to kinda "test" usage. After clearing iOS stats, I found myself using 260MB of data alone in about 1.5hrs over the day (between on WiFi and cellular data only) with what should really amount to no streaming activity whatsoever.

Some sort of assistance or acknowledgement of the problem would be greatly appreciated. 

[jean3601]

@balphius @Craigski

Alright, thank you guys so much for all the information, I am going to escalate this to Spotify staff. We should have an answer soon 🙂

[balphius]

I'm up to 896mb today after still continuing to use synced playlists. Something is clearly wrong.

[Craigski]

Hey @balphius, given you seem to be having similar issues to me, could you check something for me?

Connect your cellular.  set a playlist to 'available offline'.  Switch back to WiFi and see if it starts downloading.  Now while it's downloading, jump to your phones cellular stats page and see if it is using your cellular data even though you are connected to wifi.

Cause that is what it's currently doing for me.  It downloaded  300MB using cellular even though I was connected to WiFi at the time.

Ufortunately Support misread my email and closed my case thinking I was saying everything was working great now.

[balphius]

100% that's what's happening. It climbed to 1.2gb since then while I was on WiFi.

[Craigski]

Well....That's just great.

Just so you know, I wiped my phone to factory settings and installed nothing but Spoitify and confirmed it's still doing this.

Here are the steps I sent to Spotify when I tried to get to them to reopen the case.  You might want to put in a support case as well.

• Wiped phone.  Did minimal setup.  Installed and logged into Spotify.
• Disconnected from WiFi
• Went to my Discover Playlist and selected "Available Offline"
• The message "Waiting for WiFi" appeared and it didn't download as expected
• Reconnected to WiFi and the playlist started  to download as expected
• Monitored cellular activity from the phones cellular settings
• Spotify was actively using cellular data, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS CONNECTED TO WIFI.
• Spotify downloaded the entire playlist, around 300MB, over cellular data, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS CONNECTED TO WIFI.

The all caps was probably a bit much.  But it's kind of scary to have an app that can ignore wifi and download gobs of data over your cellular.  I'm not on an unlimited plan.

[balphius]

All I really want is acknowledgement of the problem and a promise to fix it. I'm not even mad about the overages but when the premium plan is literally sold as "no data fees" it leaves a really sour taste in my mouth when I get a bull**bleep** response from the Twitter support that I should be using offline mode instead (simply put: No. That's you being lazy. And I'm super happy to switch to a free plan or discontinue use if that's your solution).

I don't mind a little bit of data usage. Trickle usage when playing synced songs--even up to like 50mb a day would literally go unnoticed by me.

It's the fact that I'm being blamed for a problem that Spotify refuses to admit is occurring why I'm having an issue here. 1.2gb over two days when I'm not playing new songs and have cellular downloads off is totally unacceptable.

I saw some musings that this is an ancient bug related to album artwork where it's constantly trying to sync the song, which actually makes sense--because, really, why is an offline song EVER showing blank artwork? I had never thought about this until I read it but it makes perfect sense.

I'm even happy to be compliant to troubleshoot or debug, but I just need someone who works for Spotify to listen, first.

Guys? Anyone?

[Craigski]

I think you have to put in a tech request.  Only problem is, you start with tier 1 tech support.  And each time you get a response it's from a different person.  And sometimes, like what's just happend to me, the person will completely misunderstand you and think it's solved. 

And because of timezones and work loads you only get one or two responses a day.  And you know for the first few emails they are going to blow you off with general troubleshooting you've already done, but you can't skip it because they are following a script.  You just gotta soldier on through it.

I try to take screen shots with annotations and arrows for each step.  My mistake this time was one of my emails had a screenshot of me setting up the issue.  I took one of me setting 'available offline' to true while on 4G, with an arrow pointing at the 4G symbol and the 'Waiting for WiFi' status.  It was just meant to show where I was starting from.  I then included additional screenshots of each step to show it was downloading over cellular once I reconnected to WiFi.

Unfortunately, the person looked at the first screenshot only, ignored the the rest and replied with, "It's normal for it to display that message while on cellular.  Problem solved.  Thanks for your time."  Boom.  Three days of patient, slow, methodical emails back and forth, and the case gets closed because of one misread email. 

Very frustrating.

[balphius]

Call me crazy, but how do I put in a tech request? I only see Twitter (who as I said previously has proved to be entirely useless so far suggesting solutions that suggest they've never used the app) and this.

Last night I wasn't even listening to music (but discovered the app was open) and it balooned to 1.5gb usage since my previous checkin a couple hours earlier of 1.2gb. Not a single song played.

I realize that a lot of this sounds like it's normal (and the rest of this is just going to be me venting...) -- it's using data because I'm using the app, right? But whats the point of syncing songs if they have to stream? Whats the point of having access to a library of music and paying for a feature that's supposed to cache them locally if I can't reliably listen to them without excessive data usage. I don't want to to have to go to offline mode or to disable cellular data entirely, that defeats the point of me paying for the value of premium in the first place.

[Craigski]

I followed the links in the footer till I got to this page, https://support.spotify.com/us/contact-spotify-support/

Click through the selections till you see the green, "I still need help" and it will let you fill in a form.  Just make sure you are logged into the main spotify website before you do this as it will pull your details from your account.  When they respond to you, it will switch to email.

And no, I don't think the data usage you are seeing is normal.  Until a few months ago I didn't stream over cellular at all.  I'd sync a bunch of playlists at home and just use those.  I never bothered with putting it in offline mode or turning off cellular data.  It still used some data like any internet connected app, but nothing that ever stressed me out on my 2GB cap.

[balphius]

Some progress. One step forward, a dozen or so backward it would seem. 

Through much Twitter pestering an issue was identified that they cleared and asked me to delete the app and reinstall (again). 

Initially I thought progress had been made so did this and started to resync songs with stream set to normal mode, download to high, and cellular downloading remaining disabled as it always has been. 

I got about 50% of the way through and felt like it was probably safe for me to reenable cellular data through iOS. 

Wrong. 

I woke up this morning to 8gb of usage. That I continue to shoulder the blame for not "properly using offline mode" for a paid feature that is so obviously not working is beyond dumbfounding and I'm quite close to sending Spotify my data bill in addition to cancelling my account and ensuring that not another living soul I know feels like they're remotely capable of offering anything more than an absolutely embarrassing experience. 

This is the last stage of grief with excess unintended data usage? Right?

[Craigski]

8GB.  Ouch. 

After they did the tinkinering, did the issue where it downloads using cellular, even if you are connected to WiFi go away for you?

They said they made some changes to my account in the background, but that issue never went away for me.

A new update got released last night, but within 5 mins of testing it was pretty obvious that it hadn't fixed the issue for me.

Here is how I tested:

• Reinstalled Spotify
• Disconnected my WiFi
• Browsed to a playlist
• Set it to be Available Offline
• The message appeared at the top saying "Waiting for WiFi" as expected.
• I connected to WiFi and the playlist started to download.
• I checked the iphones cellular stats and observed that it was downloading over my cellular connection.  Even though I had a stable WiFi connection.
• Sighed, deleted Spotify again.

[jean3601]

Hey Ladies and Gentlemen!

Thanks for reporting this, I have sent this to Spotify staff and they are looking into it 🙂

[balphius]

So, I've been working with someone from support and it was acknowledged as a bug of sorts with 5.4.0 and it looks like there was a mini-build increment.

I've not turned on data yet, for fear of my phone exploding, but the acknowledgement and suggestion that it is fixed is indeed promising.

[Craigski · Accepted solution]

This has been resolved for me.  It was linked to whatever was happening in the 'Very high usage' thread.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-iOS-iPhone-iPad/Very-high-data-usage/td-p/1321689

Post with the explanation and fix.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-iOS-iPhone-iPad/Very-high-data-usage/m-p/1331582#M59115