Metadata inconsistently displays on Honda headunits over Bluetooth

[Revildab]

Country:

United States

Device:

iPhone X (issue occurs on older iOS devices as well)

Operating System:

iOS 11 (occurs on older iOS versions as well)

Vehicle:

2014 Honda Civic

Issue:

Metadata is inconsistently displayed when playing media over bluetooth to Honda headunits for 9th generation Civics (2012-2015) and other simular Honda infotainment systems.  It appears that on first pairing, metadata is displays perfectly fine but after the car is turned off and bluetooth is disconnected, metadata stops being updated until either the user kills the current Spotify instance or plays media using iOS's first party media apps.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Connect via Bluetooth to any 2014 Civic HondaLink infotainment display unit
2. If Spotify is cached in memory or in the iOS multitasker, kill it.
3. Start a fresh instance of Spotify on the iOS device and play any song
4. Note that the song's metadata will display during this time and will update if/when new tracks are loaded
5. Turn off the car and wait 1-2 minutes to ensure all electronic systems in the car are powered down.
6. Turn the car back on and allow the headunit to automatically resume media playback from Spotify
7. Observe that the headunit will no longer display metadata

Reproduction Rate:

100%

Additional Notes:

An alternative fix to getting metadata to display is to play media from first party iOS apps such as Apple Music or the native Podcast app. However, switching to native apps and back to Spotify or killing the app and restarting it to force metadata to pass through is a pretty terrible user experience.

Hopefully this is detailed enough to help.

[choowy]

This sounds like the same issue I started having a few weeks ago after having no problems with the same phone + truck combination for several months.

Samsung S9+

Android 8.0

2018 Chevy Silverado

In addition to the problems with metadata not updating, I also seem to have trouble navigating within the app until a new instance is opened, i.e. pages fail to load within the app even though I'm online.