Seriously flawed offline data management

[tompabes]

Hi,

it seems to me that the Spotify app has serious problems in handling downloaded data when we delete some offline playlists. More precisely:

1) it seems to me that downloaded data is placed in the cache and the space occupied by an offline playlist is not freed when the playlist is deleted (by contrast, Sony Music Unlimited uses the application data directory and actually deletes downloaded files when you remove a playlist, unfortunately it has many other problems....)

2) if I want to free space I have to delete the WHOLE cache, thus deleting EVERY downloaded playlist

3) the app then does not realize that cached data has been deleted and when I try to play an offline playlist (of course one that I did not delete) the app is just stuck there forever trying to start the song

4) what's more, the app pages become white, I cannot open the settings page anymore (it's white) and cannot do anything at all

5) To recover, I had to delete application data and login again and... BUMMER! All my downloaded playlists were GONE. All my SETTINGS were gone as well!

6) if I start Spotify on my other phone, the playlist has been deleted (and that's ok), but of course I have the same problem that the space occupied by that playlist is not freed. So I should repeat the "reset" procedure on every device I have, which is clearly quite annoying.

I find this embarassing... how can it be that the only way to free some space is to delete everything, login again, restore your preferred settings and download again every playlist you want to listen to offline?

Right now I'm really annoyed and find that this can't be acceptable for a paid service. I think it's also a bit lame for a software developer to miss important things like this when designing and developing an application.

The service should be easy to use and bug free, at least those macroscopig bugs should not be present, and I think that if Spotify wants to survive when the big players like Google and Apple will enter the streaming music market they'd better fix those things very quickly!

So my question is: does anyone know if these are known problems and if we can expect a solution in acceptable time? Or it's me? Am I missing something?

Thanks to anyone that will help.

[Peter__ · Accepted solution]

Hey! Welcome to the community 🙂 

To my knowledge the app will delete those tracks to free space, but not in the way you might expect. 

As far as I know, the Spotify app will temporarily store any deleted content you have, in case you have unmarked it as undownloaded by accident, in which case it would be a massive waste of bandwidth to have to download all of those tracks again right away. I don't have an android device to test, but other people have reported offline content which is no longer offline will be removed "eventually" as for if/when that happens I don't know!

Peter

[tompabes]

Thank you for your help!

This solves the problem: I'll simply wait for Spotify to delete the files and I'll never clean the application cache from the Android settings again.

I still think that the developers should handle the case where an user manually deletes the cache by fixing the bug that leaves the application in an inconsistent state, as we know that in Android users can delete the cache whenever they want (and there are also cleaning apps that do this).