App shows wrong track

[oooooooooooooo]

Plan

Premium

Country

AT

Device

Pixel 2

Operating System

Android (latest)

My Question or Issue

At some point the app will run into the following issue. Just now it was when I had a paused podcast open and started to shuffle one of my private playlists:

- The music will start playing

- The playback screen will still show the previous track (podcast)

- Going back and forth on the playback screen will show the next/previous podcast, but what I actually hear are the next/previous song of my playlist

- Even though music is playing I will see the "Play" button. If I click it nothing happens except that it switches to "Pause". Clicking "Pause" will pause playback, then clicking "Play" will continue playing the song, and not the displayed track (podcast in my case)

- Same for the system notification: the podcast is shown, even though I hear music

- In the web version of Spotify I can see the track that is actually playing. I can remote-control my phone from there, but what is actually displayed in the Spotify Android app does not change.

The only thing that helps is completely resetting the Spotify app.

This has been happening regularly, for at least 6 months now (when I started using the service). I see that this has been reported already, and marked "Fixed" by Spotify last year. I am on the latest version, and this is not fixed.

This issue is serious to me: I have spent the last 20 minutes 

- typing this

- finding a username that is not taken

- clicking images of parking meters, bridges and traffic lights to prove I am human despite being a dog

- cleaning the site cache and cookies to resolve an "unexpected error"

I hope, and if I were religous I'd pray, that someone at Spotify will take this seriously as well. Thanks.

[Ver]

Hey @oooooooooooooo,

Thanks for getting in touch with us. Don't worry. Help is here 🙂

Could you give these steps a go and run a clean reinstall? This one is more thorough than the usual one.

Just to double-check- could you try on another device to see if the issue persists? That way we can see if it's a device-related issue.

It's also a good idea to try with another network. Are there any changes?

You can also send us a video recording of what you're seeing. We'll investigate this further.

Keep us posted! We'll be right here if you have any questions.

[oooooooooooooo]

Hi, 

thank you for your answer.

As written above, yes, resetting the app helps for a while, until a week later or so when the issue surfaces again.

I don't have a multitude of phones to test this, but I can tell you that if I open Spotify in the browser it shows the song that is currently playing on my phone, and I can pause, play and change the song, and my phone will indeed pause, play or change the current playback. What my phone does not however is show which song is playing. It will still show the podcast I had listened to a couple of hours earlier.

When I had the problem I switched between network types (Wifi, 4G) and the issue persisted, regardless of network type.

I hope that the engineering team can find a more sustainable solution that does not require a reset or uninstall/install of the app to continue listening.

[Alex]

Hi there @oooooooooooooo

Thanks for the reply.

Can you try the following: Log out Everywhere, Uninstall the app again with the steps that's provided in the clean reinstall article. After that - switch off your phone > take out your SD card > start the devices again without the SD card > reinstall the app. 

Also make sure that there is no Battery Optimization enabled for Spotify and that the app has all permissions on your phone.

Keep us posted.

[oooooooooooooo]

I can try that the next time I encounter the issue. 

I do not have an SD card however. Is that a problem? Should I remove the SIM card instead?

[Alex]

Hi @oooooooooooooo,

Thanks for getting back to us.

Sometimes when there are issues like this one, where the app is not updating in real time it's connected to how your device stores data from the app or it's an account issue. Taking out the Sim card won't change much, since you'll just lose you mobile connection.

Since you've tried a clean reinstall, we'd suggest you try logging in with a different account to test this. You can ask a friend/family member to log in with theirs or create a new free account to try this out.

Let us know how it goes.