Why is it so slow and unreliable?

[mlwry]

Plan

Premium

Country

United Kingdom

Device

Samsung Galaxy S9

Operating System

Android 8.0 Oreo, Samsung Experience Version 9.0.

My Question or Issue

Why is the app so slow, unresponsive and unreliable? It's almost physically painful just waiting for it to load the Home, Search or Your Library pages. I'm connected on Wifi and just opened up the app from a fresh restart and it took five minutes for Home to load. Other times in the past it doesn't matter how long I leave it, nothing ever loads, or I type something like 'Mastodon' into search and I just get that stupid spinning wheel for minutes upon minutes. The only solution I've found is simply to keep force-quitting it and trying again repeatedly until it gets its **bleep** together.

I'm honestly really, really sick of this. It's been an issue raised in this community for years now and the developers still haven't fixed this. It's unacceptable, and renders the app borderline unusable for long periods of time. I'm on a 2017 flagship phone, if your app runs badly on it then that's on you. It's pushing me towards Apple Music, because at least I know that when I open up their **bleep** Android app there's not going to be a **bleep**ing five minute wait to even be able to search for an album to play.

[Kamran]

Hi @mlwry,

I am unable to reproduce this issue on my OnePlus 5T. It loads in under 2 seconds for me. If you're using an SD card however, it might be having trouble accessing and reading the data on the SD card if it has a lot of content on it, which tends to be an issue with SD cards that are not rated for high performance. If you're not using an SD card though, it may just be Samsung, their Android skin has been known to be fairly bloated and slow, and this may impact the performance of Spotify on their devices. 

I've attached a screen recording of my phone's performance when opening and searching for Spotify content, but please note that I didn't do much as I wanted to keep the video really short. 

Also, have you tried doing a reinstall of the Spotify application? Reinstalling the app fixes a wide array of issues, and it may fix your problem.

Hopefully this is of some help. 🙂

[ooky]

Ai agree, spotify has become unusable recently.

It's not just the sd card issue, even navigating the settings can result in the spinning ring of boredom. 

I'm paying for this rubbish.... 

[josedest]

Yes this is **bleep** joke. It just does not run properly on Samsung Android. Every other app works. You can even watch a cycle: For every spotify update either the Spotify app runs ok (but with the same bugs that also appear and disappear from update to update) or it is running abysmal slow. It is a cycle clearly related to the sporify updates. Before the recent one, spotify ran fine. The update got installed, now spotify is slow as **bleep** and even crashes.

Yet spotify still blames Samsung. For years now.

You have to find another "tech" company which is that stubborn and ignorant. Maybe hire developers who actually know what they are doing? This is pathetic for a product that does not even get any new end user features. How the **bleep** do you manage to constantly break your product one way or the other again and again?

[Kamran]

---

@josedest wrote:

Yes this is **bleep** joke. It just does not run properly on Samsung Android. Every other app works. You can even watch a cycle: For every spotify update either the Spotify app runs ok (but with the same bugs that also appear and disappear from update to update) or it is running abysmal slow. It is a cycle clearly related to the sporify updates. Before the recent one, spotify ran fine. The update got installed, now spotify is slow as **bleep** and even crashes.

Yet spotify still blames Samsung. For years now.

You have to find another "tech" company which is that stubborn and ignorant. Maybe hire developers who actually know what they are doing? This is pathetic for a product that does not even get any new end user features. How the **bleep** do you manage to constantly break your product one way or the other again and again?

---

Spotify very much does get new user end features. They just take a bit to show up. Like, recently they added a brand new storage menu to Settings and are in the process of adding song credits. Other than that, it's not Spotify's problem that it works like crap on Samsung Galaxy devices. Samsung messes with the native Android APIs from their AOSP counterparts and Spotify probably just doesn't want to be bothered with properly fixing SD card support on Samsung devices because they'll probably just go and break it again. If you want working SD card support, it'd be wise to avoid a manufacturer who literally breaks system APIs.

[Daggz90]

It's not reasonable for an application to take up more than 50% of the users internal storage still run dysfunctionally. 
It's not reasonable to force people to pick a platform based on their desires to run certain applications.
It's not reasonable to demand payment for something that's not working as intended.
It's not reasonable to force users to install said application on their internal storage OR to have them upgrade their units because the application can't handle being run from an external storage such as an SD-card.

Spotify has been existing and thus been making profits for years now.
They have the funds to solve issues like this but it's currently not their main priority.
The main priority right now is to add more features to the application to attract more users and thus make more profits.
There's no profits in fixing broken things, that's a general theme of major companies in todays business climate. There is in producing new things that sound cool but don't work as they should.

Spotify has a responsibility towards their customers.
A brand new flagship unit should NEVER run slow on a simple audio streaming application unless there's a manufacturing defect or a very slow internet connection. 
However that's rarely the issue these days, no matter how much the companies try to put the blame on that or something else which concerns a 3rd party involvement.

Spotify needs to get their act together.
Censoring artists and a steady decline in application performance without an official acknowledgement of said issue and a plan or programme to take care of it, is NOT taking responsibility for your product.

I won't pay for a subscription again until these things are sorted and I would urge others to do the same. 
WE the customers, decide mainly with our money, if we think a company acts right or wrong and if they should be allowed to continue their business in the same manner or not.

This is not a sustainable business model. This is the "Apple-approach" to business which is the dirties scumbag mentality I've ever seen and I'd happily see them and all other businesses with the same attitude, to crash and burn. 

So to the Spotify developers and programmers; listen to your community, your customers. And sort things out, or WE WILL leave for a better alternative. 

Have a nice day everyone.