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.

[Bobolo]

Plan

Premium

Country

US

Device

Apple watch series 5 32gb wifi

Operating System

Version 10.6

My Question or Issue

Whenever I try and use Spotify offline mode to listen to a playlist of 100 songs without my phone present, it works 20% of the time.

Whenever I switch the device to the watch and my phone is anywhere nearby it auto forces back to the phone - bug

Whenever I kill the Spotify application on my watch, it still has all the previous data of what it was doing and doesn't effectively restart to fix any of those issues - bug

Whenever I turn off my phone and Spotify forces itself into offline mode, it won't allow me to switch the song from now playing to anything else. Even when going to playlists and trying to start the offline playlist - bug

Whenever I connect the watch with my phone, start the playlist that is downloaded for offline mode, turn off my phone, the playlist stops, refuses to skip a song, and just locks up - bug

Usually I have to uninstall the app off the watch, reinstall it and then re download the playlist to fix the issue, which then allows it to work for about a week.

The watch has plenty of space available for songs, so that is not the issue. There are multiple bugs listed here that have made it near impossible to use my watch as the only music listening device when engaging in athletic activity.

I'm looking for a solution that isn't reinstall and download the songs whenever it decides it's not feeling it anymore.

Thanks

[brettbe]

I have downloaded a playlist to my watch.

It has played on my run away from the phone and wifi in the past (as recently as last week), but today it stopped playing mid-run and mid-song (gave "Check connection" message, but the whole point of downloaded playlist is that no connection should be needed).

After returning home to wifi and my phone, I still cannot get the downloaded playlist to play.

Wondering why this isn't listed in the "Ongoing Issues" list since there are reports from many users over a long period of time about offline playback on Apple Watch.

[brettbe]

Happened to me again!

Workaround to get it working - uninstall Spotify from Apple Watch, re-install Spotify, re-download playlist to Watch.

Went on run and it worked.

About a week later, went on run and playlist started working heading out from home (and wifi) but stopped early into the run.

When I got home, figured out that my playlist had been un-downloaded. How does that happen?

[brettbe]

Happened yet again!

Before going on a run, checked my playlist to find it had been un-downloaded again.

Come on, Spotify! You really need to get to the bottom of these problems.

[brettbe]

This happened again to me.

Before my run, went to check that the downloaded playlist would play.

Playlist was still downloaded (good) but could never get it to play from the Apple Watch. Would tap on the 'playback' icon showing playback on the phone, select Apple Watch, Spotify would think for a long time and then switch back to phone playback.

The "workaround" was to uninstall Spotify from the watch, re-install Spotify on the watch, re-download my playlist (which takes longer than it seems like it should).

Then Spotify was able to play the downloaded playlist from my watch.

If anyone is actually looking into the problem, I would be happy to run a debug version of the app on my watch to provide logs, etc.

Very annoying that the one Spotify feature that I use on the watch works correctly so infrequently.

[brettbe]

Happened yet again!!

Went to the gym.

Put my headphones (Wireless Beats) in.

Podcast I had been listening to on my phone in Spotify started playing – tapped pause (I very infrequently use Spotify on my phone, so this could be a new wrinkle).

Swiped over to “Your Library” on Apple Watch.

Watch already had my library filtered for Downloads and said “Spotify is offline”

Selected my downloaded playlist – error message “Something went wrong – Check you connection and try again.”

BUT… I am offline, so why do I need a connection??

Eventually the “Your Library” page didn’t show any downloaded content – so Spotify un-downloaded my playlist??

I connected to the gym WiFi away from my phone and re-downloaded my playlist.

I was then able to playback the playlist – but I wonder if my watch was streaming as it would sometimes stop playback between tracks (would start back up if I pressed Play).

HELP!!

[Joan]

Hi there @brettbe,

Thanks for reaching out and for providing all of this info. We'll be glad to look deeper into this one.

Could you please try the following steps if you haven't already to make sure we've covered all of our bases for troubleshooting:

• Restart Spotify
• Reinstall Spotify from your watch and phone
• Uninstall now playing app
• Unpair/Re-pair your watch to your phone
• Make sure the app is on the latest version across both devices

Let us know how it goes.