Spotify app not appearing in task bar, unresponsive to Bluetooth.

[saltedfish]

Hello all;

I've been having an issue the past few weeks wherein the Spotify app icon does not appear either in the task bar to the left of the signal strength, et all, and also fails to appear on the lock screen. When this happens, the music can still be heard, and tapping on the Spotify icon on the home page will open the app normally and allow me to pause, skip, etc.

Naturally, this is ridiculous, since the app is supposed to have the ability to be controlled through the lock screen, and it's a tremendous pain in the **bleep** to have to unlock and navigate to the app just to pause.

The other thing about this issue is it is intermittent. About 40% of the time, the app responds to my Bluetooth headset and appears on the lock screen. But the remaining time, I have to open the app itself in order to control the music.

I've tried checking the notification settings in the Android settings, and Spotify has all the permissions it needs in order to appear where it should.

I am running Android 6.0.1, and uninstalled/reinstalled the Spotify app just yesterday. Any advice would be appreciated.

[Joe]

If you look at the existing threads listed on the first page of this forum, you'll see these issues are already being discussed and that work-arounds have been suggested.

[saltedfish]

Thanks for the tip -- I looked at some of those and wasn't able to find a solution. Power saving mode, which seems the most likely, is completely disabled on my phone. I'll give the full wipe reinstall a shot though.

[saltedfish]

I have iterates through the stickied threads at the head of this forum.

My phone does not have an SD card, so that eliminates many problems right there.

Looking through the "[PSA] Samsung users please read!" thread, the focus seems to be on the power management (battery optimization and power saving modes). I can verify that neither of these features are activated, and even if they were, Spotify has been excluded from their effects.

I also pored through the "[COMPLETE GUIDE] How to fix most Android issues" thread I found in someone's signature. I did do a clean install, checking with Solid Explorer that there were no residual Spotify folders, then reinstalled from the Play store, logged all my devices out, and rebooted. Many of the problem descriptions do not match my symptoms, but we can exclude any that involve the SD card and power management. I do not have a cache cleaner, task or process management app, or battery manager installed. Do not have a blue light filter, all my accounts are logged in as the same user, haven't had any issues with networks, no issues with shuffling or account types, and I've allowed all content to be shown on my lock screen.

I'm hoping by explaining what I've done, maybe some other solution will come forward, but the ones listed here do not seem to be doing the trick.

[Joe]

There really is no point in starting a thread of your own relating to issues which are being discussed by many folk elsewhere in the community. I'm pretty sure Spotify is aware of the problems and any solutions will be posted in the other threads.

You can always contact spotify direct, as an alternative, using the online contact form. 

[saltedfish]

That's.. a very unhelpful thing to say. Is posting issues here not the whole point of this forum? As we've deduced at this point, this appears to be a new issue given that I have stated the other suggested solutions did not work or are not applicable. at this juncture, I think I absolutely should post this here in the hopes that someone else will be able to offer a suggestion that might lead to a solution. I would hope that bringing attention to the issue will foster a solution.

If you have nothing further to add, then no futher comments are necessary, unless you'd like to direct me to one of these "other discussions."

[saltedfish]

At any rate, the issue seems to be the current version of Spotify. As described in this thread:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Notification-and-lock-screen-controls-not-available-on-Andr...

Rolling back to version 6.2 seems to solve the problem. The timeframe seems to match with when my issues started.