Android Auto and Spotify keeps breaking download location

[CobyBE]

Plan

Premium

Country

Belgium

Device

Samsung Galaxy S7

Operating System

Android 5.1.1 & Android 9

My Question or Issue

I always use Spotify with Android Auto so I can use Waze as GPS and Spotify as media player in my Android Auto enabled car. To start android auto I have to connect my phone using USB cable.

It happens multiple times a week that when I arrive at my destination and I unplug my cellphone that spotify will "forget" my SD card. To fix this I have to restart the phone and reselect the external SD card as download location. Instead of recognizing that it already has about 10GB of downloads on it, the folder is cleared and everything downloads again.

Analysis:

 - Song that's playing doesn't need to be a downloaded one when unplugging the phone

 - Also happens for example when listening to a pod cast

 - Other apps do not "forget" my SD card. e.g. I save all my pictures to my SD card and those don't disappear (this was checked after Spotify forgetting my SD card)

 - SD is high quality and according to specs

 - SD card is 64GB in size

 - Songs are not actually removed

 - Happens on Android 5.1.1 and Android 9

It seems the default answer I find on these forums for disappearing downloads is that "uninstall, clean folders manually, etc" but that does not fix the problem. A restart is enough to make Spotify recognize the SD card again. But even when doing the "uninstall, clean folders" route that does not solve anything. 

This is becoming really annoying because almost every day at work I have to redownload all my songs and Spotify auto-downloads to my internal storage, filing up my internal storage and making the phone slow to use. 

Because I couldn't find a bug report I'm doing my job as a fellow developer, hope you can fix this issue guys!

[Bluepal1256]

I have the same problem on my LG V40 (Android 9). After unplugging my phone from the car, Spotify will "forget" all of the songs it downloaded and proceed to redownload everything to the phone's storage. This happens probably 8 out of 10 times I use Android Auto. Sometimes it will also log me out of spotify on my phone after driving for an hour with no issue. Most of the time I have to force stop Spotify to redownload to the sd card because it will say "there may be something wrong with your sd card". I never had any issues until I started using Android Auto and no other apps have issues with Android Auto.

[Mihail]

Hey folks,

Thanks for searching for the answer you need here.

We appreciate the troubleshooting you've done so far and the info you shared. We'd like to as you to perform a clean reinstall of both Android Auto and the Spotify app. You can find steps for Spotify here. They are more thorough and make sure that no leftover files remain, that might be causing such issues.

If that doesn't fix things, it would seem that you're experiencing a case of this Ongoing Issue. We recommend that you +VOTE and subscribe to it, if you haven't already. This way you'll be informed on any updates on the matter, as soon as there are any.

Hope you find this useful. Keep us posted if you have any questions.