Update: There was a new update yesterday (2014-04-06) which seems to have fixed it for me, and seems to be why it's started working for two people after a reinstall. Hopefully this is the end of the story, and thanks Spotify for reacting quickly to this issue.
Edit: Some people report that reinstalling the app does fix the issue for them (see here), however this does not seem to help in all cases, for example mine.
Since the new iOS update I have noticed a number of critical shortcomings and bugs which are really disappointing. I don't want to come across excessively negative, because I love Spotify, however I expect far more from a service that I am paying a subscription for, especially when it used to work (almost) perfectly, and it really is infuriating at times.
I understand the desire for a redesign of the interface in keeping with iOS 7, however redesign is not an excuse for complete loss of functionality; I can't even try out the new design because of how buggy the app has become. In the app, when I switch tracks, the interface buttons are disabled for around 15 seconds while it loads the next track info (bear in mind this is on offline playlists), including the pause/play button, and often it will take around 20 seconds to update the cover art and track info. It is even worse from the lock screen or when using headphone buttons, when changing tracks, or even just pausing, can take up to a minute (no exaggeration) to take effect. The pausing functionality is what is really aggravating, and it also destroys the functionality whereby removing heaphones pauses music. Doing this now results in full volume speaker music, which can be unacceptable in certain situations.
My phone is an iPhone 4S, and I don't believe 3 year old technology is the problem here. The old app worked fine, and you can't tell me that 3 year old technology isn't sufficient for a music player. I have tried the obvious - restarting the app, restarting my phone, deleting the app and reinstalling (and thus having to resync 500 songs in my offline playlists). Clearly this is a problem with the app and I am disappointed it was released without proper testing.
It's funny, whenever I got annoyed enough to switch to listening to Spotify on my laptop instead without being able to pause it on my phone, Spotify had no trouble recognising that I was using two devices at once. Also, redownloading the 500 songs didn't seem to stall, but somehow immediately after skipping a track I get the buggy behaviour again. Currently the cover art is completely desynchronised from the current song I'm playing because your app is getting so confused about the basic operation of changing tracks. How does changing a track take a minimum of 5-10 seconds!? It's almost impossible to go back a track because you can never press the previous button in the first few seconds where it actually does that.
I hope that an update fixing these bugs will be released soon, because it is becoming extremely frustrating to use the app. The entire reason I bought a subscription was so I could use the service on my phone, and though I've been very pleased up to this point, I just can't use my Spotify on my phone anymore.
PS: Also, there seems to be an issue with a recent OS X app update in which the app does not always capture the play/pause/change track keys (F7,F8,F9), thus launching iTunes.
😠
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random