Spotify for Android causing massive battery drain and heating of phone

[stegnersaurus]

Hello. I recently became a Spotify Premium member after using Freefor about a year. I love the service; however, I feel that the Android app is a bit lacking. I use the downloading playlists feature to avoid having to be constantly connected to a network and therefore save battery, but have noticed that any usage of Spotify, even while listening to downloaded music in offline mode while my phone is in airplane mode causes the battery to die very quickly. 1% of drain per minute is the average, I would expect this behavior while streaming high definition video; not while listening to downloaded music. It is very frustrating to have to stop listening to my music to charge my phone after only an hour at work. Additionally, my device becomes very hot when listening to music with Spotfiy.
If this is a normal occurrence with the Android app, I would hope for a fix very soon. I am glad to be a Premium member, but am not too happy with the Android app.

My phone is the HTC EVO 3D on Sprint, if that helps with anything.

Thank you for your time.

- Ben

[Coonsee]

Me too!!

[BMWKante]

for me it is the same problem. I am listening on my iPad and Spotify shows on Android Phone what is playing. I don't want this. It needs a lot of battery time :-(. Please give a fix.

[user-removed]

Try turning off "Normalise" and "Gapless playback" im sure those features would use extra processing, hence more power usage.

[Spuddd]

 still no solutions for android users its ridiculous .so as a new android user time to cancel premium membership after all this time.

[tonybogdanov]

Here's my "solution".

1. Root your phone.
2. Download MacroDroid and create a macro that kills Spotify, both app and background process.
3. Get a shortcut for the macro on your homescreen.

Once you're done using Spotify, simply hit the macro (each time) and go on with your day.

P.S. I know you can create the macro without root access, but I'm not sure if it will also close the background service, rather than just the app, which is exactly the point anyway.

[emailrob]

Thanks for this. I'm going to try it and see if it fixes some of my battery drain issues.

[Ommidi]

Here is the catch, recently updated the app to 6.9.0.1212, and battery has excessive drain compared to the previous version!!
I'm on galaxy S7 edge, using WiFi streaming music, also tried playing from downloaded music tracks, same results... Almost 10 minutes of listening costs me 12% of battery.
Btw, have been a premium user for 4 months.

Please fix, let us keep enjoying this app.

Thanks,
Omid

[Joe]

Something's not right. I too use a S7 Edge running spotify 6.9.0.1212. I just fired up spotify for the first time today and it has used <1% of battery in 15minutes.

Are you going on the percentage shown in the battery usage display? That shows the total battery usage since last charge and breaks that down into percentages used by apps. So, if only one app was used since last charge, it would show 100% against it.

If you go to the app manager and select spotify then tap "battery" it will show you what percentage of the total battery capacity it has used.

[Ommidi]

I verified my battery usage, thats how I came up with that number, I attached the screenshot here. I restarted the phone, I logged out and logged back in to the app, I cleared the ram and cache....I don't know what else I need to do to get that Wrong Something, right! Thanks for the response though.

[Joe · Accepted solution]

I'll try pictures @Ommidi since it seems you musunderstood me.

So this battery usage screen shows that spotify used 10% of the total used by all apps since last charge. If you add up all the individual percentages they'll total 100% give or take a bit for rounding errors. The percentages shown here are meaningless in isolation.

This screen capture shows that spotify used 1% of the battery capacity since the last charge. This is the significant figure and, if that was 12% after 10 minutes usage then you would have a problem as spotify would drain the battery in 80 minutes. Only this figure is relevant.

The bottom line is to check the actual usage as a percentage of the battery capacity in app manager and I suspect you really have nothing to worry about.

[Yokocho8]

I've been using Spotify Premium since May this year without problems. But for the past few days, Spotify has been:

- freezing mid-song at random times

- draining the battery on my Samsung Galaxy S7 and making it unusually hot

- crashing, sometimes not responding

What's going on?

By the way, I've listened to Spotify for maybe around 3 hours total since I last charged my phone. It drained 22% of my battery. Is that normal? I had 86% battery when I got to work this morning. I turned on Spotify, listened to my offline songs, and a couple of hours later (and a few Spotify restarts later since it kept freezing), I was shocked to find my battery was at 33%. My phone was extremely hot as well. I immediately force closed Spotify at that point. I needed my phone to stay alive for the rest of the day.

[asentner]

I'm having the exact same problem on my Galaxy S6

[noxious]

Nexus 5 here, same issue. Android 6.0.1

[ddsak]

Same here. SGS7 with Nugat - up to 6% akku consumption per hour during listening via Chromecast Audio. 

[CBroeter]

Same here also on Android 6

[cafk]

Android 7. Sony z5 compact
Cpu keep awake is at 5hours currently..
Before with Android 6 this was not as big of an issue..
Bye bue to listening musoc all day..

[Giusepper11]

It is looking awful here on samsung note edge 6.0.1. It drained 20% of battery on half hour listening offline music with screen off

[alexloula]

I'm a premium user for more than 2 years using Spotify in various smartphones (LG G3, G4, G5 and Samsung S7) and in all models I have faced this battery issue, besides other problems like app very slow, crash and SD card library corruption. I have reported all these issues in Google Play already, but today I'll focus on the excessive battery drain.

I have used the Google Battery-Historian tool to make a detailed analysis and it's clear that Spotify has battery performance problems. The tool is reporting what the other users are also reporting, the app is draining around 5% of phone battery by hour with screen off and local library (no network usage). This is too much for an audio player, something is wrong.

I could help you to fix that if you give me access to the Google Console to better analyze and check the Android Vitals indicators.

[user-removed]

İt drains massive battery even when i'm not using it... İ tried app to stop it in background but Spotify cant be stopped! İ'm using this app for one week but if it isn't stop i haber to cancel mu premium account... And nothing has been solved dont lie to us. İt's a problem since 2013...

[Jigalo123 · Accepted solution]

Okay i think i solved the problem, go to Spotify.Com reset your password, then sign out of all connected spotify devices. Delete all aps and cache, reboot your phone. Download Spotify app, sign in with new password. And it all works like a charm, my battery hasnt gotten warm or drained at all since. And my energysaver doesn't continuously warn me that spotify is not using power correctly anymore. Try it!!! 🙌