Bug when scrolling long lists of podcast episodes

[ScottCUK]

Plan

Premium

Country

UK

Device

(IPhone XS Max)

Operating System

(iOS 16.6)

My Question or Issue

There is buggy behaviour when scrolling a long list of podcast episodes - the list jumps back or forward erratically, or jumps to the top or bottom of the list, making it extremely hard to get to an episode in the middle of the list.

e.g. The Las Culturistas podcast has ~400 episodes. When trying to scroll to find an episode in the middle of this list, if you scroll fast the list will jump to the opposite end of the list immediately instead of scrolling through quickly.

If you scroll slowly then every so often the list will jump back 10 or so episodes in the opposite direction to where I was scrolling.

if you are in an individual episode page, when backing out of the page to the list of podcasts, the behaviour is erratic - sometimes it will default to one end of the list, sometimes is will jump to a different place in the list.

The scroll bar behaviour which is pretty standard across iOS (hold the scroll bar down and move through a long list quickly) is broken and doesn’t allow this, and if you do try this from muscle memory then invariably Spotify will start playing the episode nearest your finger press, even though the action was not a tap to play an episode.

All in all, it is pretty frustrating to find an episode in a long list of separate episodes in a long running podcast series. This has been going on for months and it’s only now I have broken and can’t stand it any more and must ask you to fix this buggy behaviour.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you had better functionality to navigate through podcast series with large catalogues of content - how about:

- option of hiding all played episodes

- a quick way to scroll to the top/bottom of the long episode list

- some way of easily scrolling or jumping to months/years in a list of episodes (see how it is possible to see monthly markers when scrolling through a Google Photos library)

- left and right swipe when on a podcast episode page to take you to the previous/next episode page (without starting playback, this would just be a browse feature)

- when browsing into the view of episodes within a podcast series it takes you to either the most recent unplayed episode, the earliest unplayed episode, or the unplayed episode from the series that follows the one you listened to last.

And so on. At present it is too buggy and complicated to use and I am

consider another app for my podcast listening.

Thank you.

PS - please integrate better with Sonos and incorporate Airplay natively within Spotify - both are a bit half-baked at present. Thank you.

[Alex]

Hi there @ScottCUK,

Thank you for your post and your feedback on the various features of the app.

Regarding the scrolling on iPhone - we tried reproducing this on our end with a few different podcasts, but scrolling seemed to work fine on the devices we tested, even with podcasts featuring thousands of episodes. It's possible that there is an issue with the app itself on your phone. It's best you do a full clean reinstall of the app by following this guide.

Regarding the sorting and navigation of podcasts - you can learn more about sorting your episodes from newest to oldest etc. here.  

We've also made sure to pass on your feedback about the connectivity of the Spotify app to the right folks at Spotify.

Cheers.

[apawela]

What the OP described also perfectly mirrors my experience when scrolling long podcast episode lists. Choppy scroll, no scroll bar on the right, jumps to first/last episode if you scroll too fast.

This has been happening now for certainly more than a year.

Using an iPhone 13mini. I can’t quite remember whether it happened on my 11pro.

[MartinT]

Hey @apawela, 

Thanks for reaching out to the Community!

At the moment we haven't gotten many reports about this. We also have not been able to reliably reproduce this on our end, so let's see what we can do about it, shall we.

@Alex mentioned trying a clean uninstall, did that have any effect? Give it a try if you haven't. Could you try to test if the same choppiness will happen on a different device? Does the same thing also happen with playlists or only with podcast episode lists?

Keep us posted.

[Knelchr]

Same here!! Happens every time I’m scrolling on the stuff you should know podcast. Drives me absolutely insane. 

[Novy]

Hey there @Knelchr,

Thanks for reaching out. 

Have you tried any of the troubleshooting steps previously mentioned by @Alex and @MartinT? Keep in mind that while a clean reinstall of the app may seem basic, it usually helps with cache-related issues, so it's always worth trying.

If none of those do the trick, would you mind sending over the make, model, OS version and the Spotify version currently running on the affected device. 

We'll be on the lookout.