Storage Doesn't Free Up

[BlackBolt84]

Plan

Premium

Device

Pixel 7

Operating System

Android

My Question or Issue

Why is it that deleting a 1300+ song playlist from my phone does not release any of the storage?  It was roughly 7GB of data that is now unrecoverable by my device.  Everything I find in the community is either the completely unacceptable suggestion to uninstall and reinstall everything (requiring me to redownload another 19GB of playlists), or an equally bad explanation that Spotify just continues to hold this storage hostage and leverage it for other purposes.  Spotify does not need 7GB of space to sit on "just in case."  People's phone storage is valuable now that almost no manufacturers include memory expansion capabilities on their devices.  Please finally address this; it's been this way for years and years.

UPDATE:  Apparently Spotify was actually holding 16 GB of storage hostage on my phone.  I deleted everything and started fresh.  I redownloaded all of the exact playlists I had saved before.  Imagine my shock when what was once displayed on my phone as 19GB of data is now only 10GB (download quality wasn't changed).  Who knows how long Spotify was eating up that extra 9GB, and later an additional 7GB from the above described scenario.  This is in absolutely no way an acceptable practice for an app developed by a company that is currently worth $62.23 billion USD.  A simple "resync downloaded content" button that actually purges unneeded storage would resolve all of this

[Susan_GP]

Hi there @BlackBolt84,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community and for your detailed message - we appreciate it!

Most of the memory consumed by Spotify is because of the offline downloads you have. The app also uses your device's memory to store parts of music and podcasts as cache, so it can play without lagging. However, sometimes there can be a corrupted cache taking more space. In such a case, it's best to clear the cache by going to Settings> Storage > Clear cache. Or you can clean reinstall the app in case that doesn't help. Also, make sure your app is always up-to-date.

On another note, are you running any cache-clearing or memory-optimizing apps/services? If you are, it's best to delete them as they can also cause these types of issues.

Now, we appreciate you taking the time to let us know about this situation and for the recommendations. We always aim to improve, so we’ll get this passed on to the right team.

Cheers!

[BlackBolt84]

The problem is that for years on this and other mobile devices I've used, deleting a cached playlist does not actually free up the memory. Going to the settings as you have described will only clear the cache and not downloaded media. As stated by other responses to similar questions, it appears as the Spotify just holds on to the storage space for whatever reason afterwards. This, over time, will grow and grow until it is consuming massive quantities of phone storage. There is no way of having it audit downloaded playlists and clearing out unnecessary data usage without just removing the app entirely. The cache will not factor into this group of data, as it is all listed in Android under user data. Unless I am mistaken, there is no way to force a recheck of the data that actually needs to be there. With most people's phones no longer having expandable memory capabilities, taking up gigabytes and gigabytes of unnecessary space is hugely problematic and needs to be addressed by the developers.

If the only answer is to clear the cache (which doesn't affect the set of data) or uninstall and reinstall the app, then this needs to be escalated as a bug to the development team