Apple watch downloads dont work offline

[Slartybartfast]

I have an apple watch SE, all IOS versions are up to date (watch and phone). If I download a playlist, spotify refuses to play it through my watch (as a device) unless the watch is 1. Connected to my WiFi, and 2. Disconnected from my phone. This completely defeats the point of downloading a playlist for offline use. Further, if my phone is connected to my watch it refuses to play from my watch at all, and will just start playing from my phone.

I have tried:
- Updating IOS versions
- Turning my watch off and on again
- Deleting the spotify app and downloading it and the playlist (twice)
- Force closing the app and re-starting it
- Deleting and redownloading spotify on my phone
- Trying WiFi and Bluetooth off and on in every combo.

[Trevozneoma]

This has been happening to me as well. Offline playback on my Apple Watch Series 8 Cellular is absolutely useless at best and incredibly distracting and frustrating at worst.  Whenever I go to the gym, I prefer to leave my phone in my locker and just listen to music off of my watch. However, Spotify will not let me play directly from my watch, constantly forcing me back to listening from my phone. More frustrating than that is it will usually lock up the app completely such that I can't even stream from my phone.

I prefer to play off my watch as the gym is large and I'm not always in bluetooth range of my phone. I have tried everything, from force closing Spotify on the watch, to force closing Spotify on my phone before trying to open it on my watch. The only thing that's really worked is turning off the bluetooth completely on my phone (through settings, not through control panel) but that doesn't make sense. If I push the button to play through my watch, that's what I want. If I want to play downloaded playlists or podcasts...that's what I want. Please fix this!

For reference I have Spotify premium and offline playback was working...okay...until a couple weeks ago. I say okay because the reluctance to play from my watch still existed but I could generally fix it by force closing the app on my phone before playing off my watch.

[masterswami]

Same thing is happening with me, I downloaded a podcast on my Apple Watch for offline listening (I have cellular but no connection at my gym) and it was working until i paused it and tried to play again and then it just completely froze the app. I can't play anything downloaded now and it even made that specific podcast not work on my phone! Crazy bugs going on here... i'm trying ditch my phone 90% of the day and only use the Apple Watch so it would be great if this could be fixed asap!!

Also... don't panic👍

[flythewind]

The same thing happens to me. I also have the apple watch series eight cellular, even with a WIFI connection - Spotify won't allow me to play on my phone (which is connected to my airpod) even with downloaded music.  I like to use the Nike run app with Spotify, but it just glitches out every time. I have been thinking of switching to Apple music just for this reason. 

[NorthPark]

This issue just started for me.  It was previously working sort of until the recent ios update, but now the app just seems to lock up when I try to view my offline downloads.  This is super frustrating because I have no data connection in the gym.  Until this gets fixed, I downloaded apple music to try out, and so far it's working perfectly with no apparent bugs.

[chudnw]

Add me to this crew. Apple watch series 6. Spotify updated a few weeks ago to where the UI starts with "Your Library" then has the "Downloads" button. Last week, pressing "Downloads" showed all my downloads, but not a single one would play. It would only play streaming, then deplete watch battery/crash after about 20-30 mins (over data). I saw the latest Apple Watch update and installed yesterday. Today it played the downloads (after blinking the watch symbol for a minute or two), but depleted battery/crashed at 20-30 minutes. Really bumming me out, spotify downloads while running is the only reason I have this watch and while the UI changes are just kinda distracting, eating my entire battery for downloads is no bueno. 

[Trevozneoma]

(Update) it seems a recent update to the app has resolved this issue. Apple watch app is much more responsive and works much better. Hopefully this sticks and works to improve everyone’s experience. Many thanks to the engineer who fixed it! 

[toenni13]

I wasn't able to download a single playlist on the Apple Watch. It always starts downloading and it always gives me the exclamation mark at some point between half way through and the last couple of songs. Offline mode on the Apple Watch is literally the only thing that brought me back to Spotify after years of needlessly not making it a feature, now it's here and it still doesn't work. Please someone help me fix this bug.

[ThatNameIsTaken]

LOL it's not fixed I promise you. You are experiencing a brief moment in time where it is working for you. It will break again on you, trust me. When it does, you'll need to uninstall/reinstall Spotify/restart watch/re-download tracks etc.

I have been going through this process for years. Spotify on the Apple watch is still a hellish experience. I don't know whether to blame Apple or Spotify. I think I might try Samsung for my next phone/watch and see how it goes.

[Golo72]

Hi - I have something similar to this problem.  Spotify on my watch, away from my phone, worked from May (started running) until earlier this month (September) then died. It seemed to me that selecting 'Downloaded' was the issue - the watch showed the tracks but would not play them (or sometimes tries to play it from my phone). Take off the 'Downloaded' filter and those very same songs would play but only if there was a connection to the phone.

I got it working again last week but have no idea how.  When the new version of Spotify came out (8.8.72) it broke again.  Perhaps it's updates that do the breaking?

Anyway, trial and error has led me to turn off my phone, make sure the watch was on wifi, and then try playing.  For some reason it plays fine.  I think it's using the direct connection to Spotify to validate any authentication / approval of the library.  Once done, it's worked for me with the phone turned back on.

This is a new discovery and I need to try it again the next time this fails. Perhaps you can try it too if downloads aren't working and we can share whether it works?

[hauklien]

I have the same issue on Apple Watch 7. I have Spotify Premium, and everything is updated. When I go for a run, I cannot change playlist because my Watch says I’m offline… This used to work, and now it stopped working… Why Spotify?

[ThatNameIsTaken]

I'll spend hours downloading 1 playlist to the watch. It will work briefly and then auto removes itself from my downloads. This has happened twice in a row. After the first time, I reinstalled Spotify on the watch and my phone and that didn't fix the problem. Another thing that has always been an issue is that Spotify seems to randomly stop playing from my downloads. When this occurs, I have to trick it back to playing from my downloads by turning on cellular, then streaming a random track, then it re-syncs with my headset and I can then turn off cellular and resume playing from my downloads. This has been an ongoing issue since I started using Spotify on my Apple watch 2 years ago. To add to that as I stated above, downloaded playlists auto remove themselves from your downloads. Spotify downloading to the Apple watch remains a dreadful experience and for the most part remains broken and continues to degrade. I would love to be able to work with their tech support directly to fix these issues but it's impossible to get tech support with Spotify. I'm not even cool enough to create my own posts yet so I have to resort to replying to other people.

[felixcx]

I have the latest version of the app and the latest version from watchOS and the app keeps crashing, my playlists don't charge when I use offline. The application keeps closing all the time, the moment I manage to play a song it works for about 10 seconds and closes the application, when I try to see my downloaded playlists or albums the app close.
The Connect function to play on other devices keeps getting stuck every time I put it to play on the Apple Watch.
Is annoying because I'm user for years and I'm very upset about this bugs and errors, the app work so good at Android devices, but when it comes to watchOS or iOS the performance is very disappointing.

[KeithAbb0tt]

I am a Spotify Premium customer. Downloading music to my Apple Watch for offline playback works fine, and playback also works fine. However, on occasion (once or twice per week), the downloaded music will just disappear from my watch, whether I have listened to the music or not. Can anyone point me in the right direction to keep this from happening? TIA

[AlejaR]

Hey there @KeithAbb0tt,

Thanks for posting in the Community and welcome.

In this case, there are a couple of things you can try to see if you notice any changes:

• Perform a clean reinstall of the app on your smartphone. By doing that, the app can be up-to-date, and you can make sure some damaged cache is not leading to this inconvenience. You can find out the steps for doing it here.
• Take a look at your settings on your Apple Watch. Under Music, make sure that Optimized Storage is turned off.

If this should persist afterwards, it'd help us a lot if you sent us:

• Make/model and OS of both your Apple Watch and your mobile device.
• The exact Spotify version you're running in both.
• We'd also like to know if it's always behaved like that or if this behavior started after a specific event/OS update.

Keep us in the loop!

[KeithAbb0tt]

Thanks for the response.  I've followed the instructions exactly to perform a clean re-install of the Spotify app on my iPhone.  I'll update this post if the problem re-occurs.  Curiously, I do not have a setting under Music on my Apple Watch for Optimized Storage.

Make/model and OS of both your Apple Watch (SE 1st Gen / watchOS 10.4) and your mobile device (iPhone 15 / iOS 17.4.1).
The exact Spotify version (8.9.38.455) you're running in both.
We'd also like to know if it's always behaved like that or if this behavior started after a specific event/OS update.  Not sure what event may have triggered it, but it has not always happened.  Only been happening the past several months.

[Joan]

Hi there @KeithAbb0tt,

Thanks for the reply. How many playlists do you have downloaded? Have you noticed the issue occuring after a specific number? This can help us narrow down the possible root cause of this.

Keep us posted.

[KeithAbb0tt]

No playlists, unless downloading an album is considered to be a playlist.  I only download complete albums to listen to offline.  I've had maybe as many as ten albums downloaded at any given time, and I remove the album from the watch when I am finished listening to it.  I have never gotten close to running out of memory on the watch.

I have seen the downloaded albums deleted when there are as few as two downloaded albums.

I have a theory about what may have caused this.  I upgraded my iPhone in late January, and moved all of the apps over from my old iPhone as part of the migration.  Maybe something got corrupted during that process.  I am hoping that the clean re-install of the Spotify app on my iPhone may have resolved the issue.  It's too early to declare victory yet, but the timeline seems to line up with approximately when I started having this problem.

I'll update the post if I run into the problem again, if it doesn't re-occur I'll wait 1-2 weeks and update the post then.

[Joan]

Hi @KeithAbb0tt,

Thanks for the info. We'll be keeping an eye out for your reply. Just a heads up, instead of editing the previous reply, it would be better to post a new comment, as this will draw our attention more and allow us to notice and reply to you sooner. Fingers crossed that all you bring is good news 🙂

Keep us posted.

[KeithAbb0tt]

Well, I thought that my problem had been solved, but yesterday all of my downloaded music disappeared again!  So I'm back to where I started.  I don't think I ever saw an answer as to whether downloading an album is actually considered a playlist by Spotify.  I had downloaded (and also deleted) several albums since my last post, one of the albums contained over 50 songs.  Still not even coming close to running out of memory on the Apple Watch.  Suggestions on what to try next?