iOS very slow startup and searching

[timhoyland]

For the last 3-4 weeks Spotify on my iPhone 4 become very slow and unresponsive:

• Opening the iOS app takes around one minute - a minimum of 30 seconds and up to 90 seconds! This is for the flashing three dots to disappear and allow me to use the app. There seems to be no real difference to whether I use wifi or mobile network connections.
• Using search for new songs or to filter an existing playlist is very slow 5-10 seconds for the app to recognise that I've selected the text box and a similar time for it to respond to show the text entered.

I have over a 1,000 songs dowloaded to the phone, but that has been the case for a couple of years and only recently has the app performance dropped enough to become frustrating to use it.

Thanks

[Robbie]

Hey. Welcome to the Community!

Let's see what we can do here. What version of iOS and Spotify are you running at the moment, please?

Something to try right away is a hard reset. If you turn your phone completely off for a minute or so, is there any improvement? How much free space do you have remaining, and do you have many other apps running in the background?

[rahim]

+1

I believe I've suffered the same problem, but I've never known how much of this is simply expected performance given the hardware and usage levels as I'm using a device with half the RAM and a CPU that's an order of magnitude slower than the current iPhone.

I first experienced slow startup with iOS6, but the problems persist in iOS7 with the most recent app version at the time of writing (0.9.0.8)

My data:

  iPhone 4 32GB, iOS7.0.4, 3.5GB free

  12.9GB of spotify data, 355 playlists, stream quality: normal, sync quality: extreme

  Startup time: 30s (from app icon touch, to pulsating dots hiding, all other apps quit in task manager)  

Timing wise it feels that things may have slowed in an update around the time Tim mentioned, but this may simply be coincidence.

I think something that probably exacerbates this is that the app seems to get evicted more frequently than most, I suspect due to its memory footprint, each time it's evicted the user is subjected to the full startup time on open.

According to XCode's Instruments, after load Spotify is using 80MB Real, 170MB Virtual, 15s of elapsed CPU time (all roughly averaged over three attempts). Things seem to improve marginally repeating the experiment, perhaps due to a cache priming effect. Repeating in airplane mode seems to make no noticeable difference.

Instruments trace files attached in case they're useful.

So I suppose my question is simply: is this all as expected? ie the solution is suck-it-up / buy a faster device / cutdown on number of playlists/tracks/offline tracks

This does raise the question, if it's related to usage pattern what's the determining factor here, is there an expensive operation running across all a user's playlists/contained tracks/synced tracks? An answer to this implies what change in usage would alleviate the problem.

[user-removed]

I too am experiencing the same issue on an iphone 4s - to be honest spotify is pretty much unusable. Even doing a restart and using it as the first app it takes ages to load and then is exceptionally sluggish. I know the 5 and 5s have better specs but I was expecting the app to still work. 

[Peter__]

Do you have the new "Collections" tab? 

[user-removed]

I do yes, I signed on to the beta and have been testing and providing feedback on a variety of systems. All the rest of it is excellent but something is killing ios7 - just trying a delete, power cycle and reinstall. Any ideas? I don't want out of the beta program because to be honest the collection feature makes spotify even more invaluable to me! 

[Peter__]

I would post your performance issues in the beta sections. I am having issues too on my 4S - such a pain!

[user-removed]

Well after deleting the app, powering off and reinstalling it seems to be behaving. Even after I've force closed it and opened it a few times. Which is reassuring, and it seems usable for now (!) - where's the beta section? Will add more feedback there - most of the other feedback has gone direct but I don't seem able to do that for iOS.

[rahim]

In my case, no.

[user-removed]

Hmmm ok - it does seem a bit inconsistent, I don't know if it is just me. But I find if I quit by double tapping home and swiping the app up it doesn't kill it effectively. Holding the power button till it says swipe and then holding the home button down seems to kill it properly. From there I seem to be able to get it working again. I'm often getting to a seemingly unresponsive browse page, but the menu works. Weird. 

[user-removed]

Ok - I have to concede this doesn't work. Has anyone had any luck getting the iOS 7 version working on a 4s with collection feature? Currently this app is unusable! 

[ego]

I confirm Spotify app is painfully unresponsive since last update using iOS6. Have tried hard reset to no avail.

[ROnald1967]

Slow startup and response here also.

Iphone 3GS 6.1.3 (10B329)

spotify 0.9.3.212

startup last 23 seconds, 30 to response. (see image)

offline playlist (top2000) is 1704 items

[Peter__]

Do you have a "Playlist" or "Your Music" tab in the app?

[ROnald1967]

Yes, its in dutch so called 'afspeellijsten'.