Casting to Chromecast devices issues

[muzeak]

Family Plan

Premium

UK/Lithuania

Google Pixel 2XL, Pixel 3 and Pixel 3A

Been having this issue for ages now. Some updates made it better, some reverted to where it is right now. All of my family devices exhibit it in both homes with a variety of Chromecast devices (3Gen Chromecast, Chromecast Audio x2, Google Home Mini's).

After casting to one of the aforementioned devices the app on the phone that initiated it simply disconnects at some point. What I mean by this is - When you switch on the screen after 5-10-15min (arbitrary) you can see that the app is showing a song that has already played. Two things will happen here: if I simply press to pause/skip track the Spotify will stop playing on the Chromecast device and start playing on the phone. Sometimes you will here the human voice saying 'the music stopped because it's playing on another device' or smth. If I tap on the notification, open the app and wait a few seconds, sometimes it will catch up with what's Chromecast playing at the moment and will be fully functional. So basically it feels that when the phone is in standby, Spotify is unloaded from the memory and just drifts away. That doesn't happen with my iPad Air2 (iOS13) if it's used to start the playback on a Chromecast device.

It goes without saying that it's super annoying and persistent. Chromecast support has alway been flaky but I'm sure it's the casting form of choice for a lot of us. Any chance it's on your radar or could be investigated? Thanks.

[Katerina]

Hey there @muzeak,

Thanks for reaching out to us, we'll do our best to help you sort this out as soon as possible!

We can recommend that you check the phones' battery settings and make sure that Spotify is set as an exception if you're using the battery optimization option.

If that's not causing the issue, could you let us know if you also have trouble when using the Connect feature on the Pixel phones with devices other than the Chromecast supported ones?

We'll be on the lookout for your answer and we'll see what we can suggest next. Let us know if there's anything else we can do for you in the meantime.

[muzeak]

Hey Katerina, thanks for your reply. Good shout, I completely forgot about the battery optimisation. Spotify was indeed marked as optimised so I whitelisted it. Will give it a go over the weekend and see what happens. Cheers!