I think I figured out the widget...

[navaira]

The widget constantly crashes after some time. I'll play some music, widget works fine, I'll put my phone away for a few hours, widget is back to blank. Is it possible that Android treats the widget as a memory hogging app and simply closes it to spare RAM? Is there a way to disable that in Android or Spotify?

[Daniel]

Exactly. Android will close a process after a period of inactivity to save battery and free up RAM. There is a way to keep an application enabled by creating a persistent notification, but as the need for this is minimal I doubt the Spotify developers would look into doing this.

[navaira]

But Spotify does have an ongoing notification which stays even once I stop listening. But then it disappears.

I wish it was possible in Android to flag an app as "essential, do not stop". I configured Headset Button Controller to open Spotify and press play when I put in the headphones jack, but it doesn't work most of the time because Spotify takes a very long time to open and the "play" event seems to get lost in the process.

[Daniel]

The notification widget isn't set as persistent... meaning that if you close the app the notification disappears.

A persistent notification remains even after closing the app... this leaves the application processes still running in the background so that Android won't close it.


I think a lot of people would get frustrated with having a persistent notification enabled to maintain the application process as even when not using Spotify it would be shown in the notification shade.

[navaira]

Mmm, I wonder if people would prefer to have a "enable permanent notification" switch in settings or to deal with an app that unloads itself from memory and so doesn't really allow autoplay.

I wonder how Poweramp manages to do all this (plus "back" button on the home screen")...

[navaira]

Ooookay... can someone explain to me how is it possible that Spotify is actually playing music but the widget has crashed and remains blank until I click it?

[Daniel]

The widget and the media player use different parts of the android system. Therefore even if the widget process has crashed, Spotify can still be streaming via the media renderer. It's only if the entire Spotify application crashes that the hooks to all events will be lost.

Think of it like a parent and child, the parent app will continue to run and all the child processes run from this... if one child process crashes it doesn't affect the other child processes.

[navaira]

That's what I thought. I got an app called RAM Manager which is supposed to keep Spotify in memory all the time, but I don't know how to keep the widget – would you happen to know the name of the process?

[Daniel]

I don;t have access to the development tools for Spotify (I'm just a user like yourself). However, I'm pretty sure the Spotify Widget uses the 'Broadcast Receiver' service and is called ".spotlets.widget.SpotifyWidget".

If your RAM Manager can find and keep this active you should be all good!

[navaira]

I only had time to check it now and it looks like I can't edit the build.prop file (no root) and memory manager only works per app, not per process 😞

I'll keep on trying and if I succeed I'll post here.

[navaira]

Aaalright.

I am listening to Spotify on my Mac and fired up the widget to add some new lolcontent to my blog about Spotify errors. Then I closed it. The widget crashed by now but my phone shows that Spotify used 23% of my battery despite the fact I didn't actually do anything with it. So that's what Connect does.

I can't wait for Apple Music to fix the sync issues.

[-TheReal-]

It really can't be that difficult. Other music players like Deezer or Google Play Music keep their widgets alive without problems. Meanwhile Spotify never got it to work in YEARS! As soon as my free test period is over I'm gonna switch to Google Play Music.

[Xbyte]

I don't think there is a correlation between widget and notification necessarily, since Play Music and Samsung Music app manage to make their widget functional after time even if they aren't showing on the notification bar anymore... What's the point of having a widget on my homescreen if I have to open the app for it to work properly?

[Waldrepaaron]

Settings _ application manager_ downloaded apps _ spotify _ SHOW NOTIFICATIONS===must be ON

my widget disappeared too and it was cuz I turned off notifications....simple but so frustrating...lol