Spotify randomly switches to Sonos devices

[decoder_oh]

Plan

Premium Family

Country

Germany

Device

One Plus 8, Mate Lite, Linux Desktop

Operating System

Android, Linux

My Question or Issue

We have new Sonos speakers in several rooms that we use quite often with Spotify through the connect feature. With this, we noticed severe annoyances that seem to be a bug in Spotify:

1) At random times, while in *local* playback, Spotify would connect to one of the Sonos devices and continue playback there, *without any* interaction by us. I even saw this happening on my Laptop (Linux). Music was playing locally and suddenly stopped, then switched to Sonos and the green icon in the bottom right would indicate a connection too.

2) Spotify sometimes starts or continues playback on a Sonos device even though it was stopped before. This especially happened twice in the middle of the night with absolutely no interaction.

If you need me to debug anything, you are in luck as I am a software engineer, but it is really annoying to have such a bad experience with such an expensive setup.

[decoder_oh]

Oh, and one more symptom: it even switches from one sonos device directly to another one, also randomly and unprompted.

[Joan]

Hi there @decoder_oh,

Thanks for reaching out. Does this happen regardless of which device the playback was started on? Please send us a video of the behaviour too and we'd be happy to investigate this.

Keep us posted.

[decoder_oh]

Yes, this happens regardless of the device type. It happened on two distinct Android phones as well as a Linux Desktop.

It's difficult to tape because it just happens at random (my guess is when the target device (Sonos) briefly loses wifi network connectivity).

Yesterday, I found out that one of my wifi access points was malfunctioning and the Sonos device was connected to another one that was much further away (with bad signal). Since I fixed this, the problem has completely disappeared.

This should however not be considered as "fixed" because this just confirms that there is actually a bug in Spotify: My current guess is that the Sonos device briefly losing connectivity, then reappearing and reannouncing itself causes Spotify to switch playback under certain circumstances, even though it was playing locally before.

If you want to try and reproduce this with engineers, I suggest streaming to a Sonos initially, then switching to local playback. Then somehow interfere with the wifi signal of the Sonos device (e.g. you could try to briefly cover it in a Faraday cage) and see what happens. According to my internet searches, many people have similar problems and bad wifi could be a common factor.

[AlejaR]

Hey @decoder_oh,

Thanks for your reply and for the detailed info shared.

In this case, it's important to mention that we don't have a Spotify app for Linux and we don't officially support devices running on Linux OS. We appreciate the time you took to report that to us. 

Since you mentioned this is happening on Android as well and can be related to a connectivity issue, it'd be really helpful if you could send us a video recording of this behavior. That way, we can investigate further and try to replicate from our side. You can attach the video in your next reply in mp4 format, or you can also upload it to YouTube or Google Drive and make it public, so we can visualize it.

We understand this is quite a behavior. You can take the time you need to record it, we'll be on the lookout, so no worries. Once more, thanks for the detailed info you provided. 

Keep us in the loop!

[decoder_oh]

As I mentioned earlier, the behavior is completely gone after I fixed the faulty access point and I cannot restore that faulty behavior now.

Given that there is this clear correlation in this case and a ton of reports of the same behavior, I can only urge for your engineers to try and reproduce the setup. My background is that of a principal software engineer and I can guarantee you that I did my investigation around here thoroughly.