Syncing my starred playlist fills the entire phone storage

[agraham]

I have a starred list that is not huge by most standards: 1700 songs or so.

It's too large to fit in the available storage on my phone which is 4 or 5 GB (some of the files are local files which are probably a bit bigger than the low-bitrate ones Spotify uses for streaming).

I have a Nexus 4 with no SD card slot.

For a long time that was no problem, Spotify occasionally complained that it was out of space but most of the songs were available when in airplane mode even if some weren't, and Android seemed to enforce that it always had enough space to upgrade apps and whatnot.

But now since I've upgraded to lollipop, Android wants to upgrade all my apps and a lot of them seem to have grown. Once available space goes below 500MB Android refuses to download app updates any more so I'm stuck without being able to update any apps.

I'm trying to figure out how to limit the size of the storage used by Spotify and I can't find a setting in Spotify or in Android to do that.

It seems amazing to me that neither Spotify nor Android have this capability - it's gotta be somewhere.

If I can't do that my only options would be to create a second "Mobile Starred" list with less songs which would be a management nightmare, or delete all of Spotify's data via Android settings, upgrade my apps, then download the Starred list again, after which Spotify would just fill up the phone's storage again immediately and I'd be back in the same boat the next time an app wants to update.

[Peter__]

@Daniel might have a clever way to do this, but I can't think of a way to do it.

[Daniel]

It's a tricky one. ART (Android Run Time) is introduced fully as part of Lollipop. This RT takes over from dalvik which cached the data required on opening an app. ART however pre-cache the application data making the app load faster, better response and also better battery usage.

However this comes at the risk of space as rather than compiling on load of the app, all apps have their cache built when they are installed. This is why you have less free space and also why apps now take up more room when you install.

I can't think of anyway around saving some space except for your suggestion of splitting your playlist up... you could try setting it to download at a lower quality as this will save some space. But that's it I'm afraid.

[agraham]

I forgot about that ART thing - that's why my apps are all getting bigger.

That sucks Spotify really needs a setting to limit its storage on Android if Android is not going to provide a way.

I might knock up a quick app that does nothing but reserve a gig of data space on the phone - that way Android will fill up the phone and when I need some space I can reduce the amount used by my app.

[Daniel]

Funnily enough i was thinking the same thing. You could maybe create a dummy partition or alternatively just run a nandroid backup and store that on your sd card so you can delete it if needed and then re-run once apps are updated.