Can't unlock the screen when Spotify is running

[cloudsmaker]

Hi,

Recently I have updated my Samsung Galaxy S Advance from Android 2.3.6 to Android 4.1.2 and since then I have this weird issue with Spotify – whenever it's open I have troubles unlocking the screen's device. It seems like the phone's dead but it's not because the music is playing, I can change the volume but the screen is just blank and can't be unlocked.

Unless I restart the phone or just wait. Usually after sometime (a couple of minutes, sometimes longer) the screen finaly is showing up for me to unlock it. And it happens 95% of the time I use Spotify.

What might be the reason?

I tried to reinstall it - still the same. 

[Joe · Accepted solution]

It sounds to me like the processor can't keep up. Are you streaming music or playling dowmloaded music, possibly stored on an external SD card? Have you tried making sure that any other apps running in the background are cleared?

[cloudsmaker]

I'm playing downloaded music (external SD). But it happens even when I'm not playing anything but with spotify still open.
And yes, I'm constantly clearing other running apps (even have a one-click button widget to clear it).

[Joe]

This seems to be a pretty common problem on the SGSA from a quick Google search and isn't related to spotify. The common suggestion is to do a factory reset and wipe the cache but you might want to check out the threads in XDA Developers for yourself before doing this as it will wipe all your data.

[cloudsmaker]

What did you find? I was looking for "android freezes after locking" and there's a wide range of problems about that and not really specific.
But maybe you're right, but still it's weird that it's happening only with Spotify.

I'll be rooting and formatting my phone soon anyways, hopefully it will solve the issue.

Thanks.

[Joe]

Root could be the way to go. I searched on "Samsung Galaxy S Advance slow" and it threw up a bunch of links in XDA and other forums.

[cloudsmaker · Accepted solution]

It really must have been the memory issue. I disabled (just discovered that...) some pre-installed apps so that they wouldn't run in the background at least. That solved the issue. I will probably try to find more other solutions to optimize the memory usage further.

Thanks a lot.