Shuffle mode requires Google Play Services now?

[Elektrokam]

Plan
Premium

Country
Brazil

Device
Samsung Galaxy S8 and S23 Ultra

Operating System
Android 9 & OneUI 1.0 (S8) / Android 14 & OneUI 6.1 (S23 Ultra)

When I click on the shuffle button, either on the current playing track screen, top button on playlist or media controls in the notification area, nothing occurs. This started some months ago, after some changes to smart shuffle. I can listen tracks sequentially or choose any of them to play, but regular shuffle simply does not activate.

This issue is not the same of massively reported issues with shuffle in the past, where the button disappeared or shuffling not being truly random. The shuffle button is present, but clicking on it does nothing. I already uninstalled and reinstalled the Spotify app to make sure it was not caused by some caching issue and the problem with shuffle still happens.

Sometime later I noticed a notification saying it requires Play Services to run, and reenabling Play Services make the shuffle option work again, confirming that indeed shuffle now requires that service to work properly. But I chose to leave Google Play Services disabled due to battery issues I had in the past involving it.

After like 5 years using Spotify on Android with Play Services disabled without issues, this artificial limitation annoys me, and it also affects users of Android variants who don't want or can't run Play Services.

TL;DR: make regular shuffle work without depending on Google Play Services, like it always did before "AI".

[bokbok]

Same exact issue, worked perfectly fine until a few updates ago