Spotify does not work properly when the device's screen is off

[bardyspoon]

I've observed this behavior on 2 Samsung Galaxy Nexus's, both with the stock, unmodified 4.1.1.

When the screen is off, Spotify's downloads/syncing chug along extremely slowly, and it also can't maintain a solid stream at any quality level (it pauses and skips frequently, so I've been using downloaded tracks to get around this temporarily). These activities work as expected when the screen is on. This is being done on Wi-Fi.

I'm guessing that Spotify isn't properly doing whatever it needs to do in order to ramp up the Wi-Fi from its normally throttled sleep state. Other music applications do not have this problem. In the advanced Wi-Fi settings for the OS, "Keep Wi-Fi on during sleep" is set to "Always".

[dcdttu]

This is likely because Spotify is calling the incorrect API when running while the screen is off.  Here's a Google guy's explanation:

WORKAROUND:
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Use this widget: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ratcash.wifiperf 



SOLUTION:
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NONE, cause it's not an (android) BUG, that's a FEATURE.



EXPLANATION: 
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WIFI_MODE_FULL_HIGH_PERF is a new function introduced in SDK API Level 2 (Android 3.1+)

If wifi lock is called by "WIFI_MODE_FULL" wifi will only be in "low performance" mode if the Hardware has some Powersaving support (like Galaxy Nexus) and the Android Version is 3.1 or newer. This Powersaving modes are enough for apps that need only few data transfer for some stuff like push notifications (IMAP idle, push notification by messangers etc.). All this works fine for me with the usual Wifi policy.

If an app requires FULL speed for something like streaming etc. it should call the new function "WIFI_MODE_FULL_HIGH_PERF". 

This can be found in the official Android SDK documentation:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/WifiManager.html#WIFI_MODE_FULL_HIGH_PERF

If you have an issue with an app, you should send a bug report to the dev of the app and make them aware of this new function (just give them the link to the sdk documentation above, they should know what to do then). Until the app is fixed you can use the widget linked above as a workaround, wich does nothing else but calling the WIFI_MODE_FULL_HIGH_PERF

[Joe]

I just replied to your other post 🙂