BMW Connected Drive iPhone 6 reconnect issues

[klaus_hespert]

The first time I connected Spotify to the car system, everything worked fine. But whenever I change to another app, disconnect my phone, or anything else what stops the connection, I have issues when I open Spotify again. Some or all Spotify buttons in the car display are disabled.
Only if I force the Spotify app to restart on my iPhone, I can connect the app properly to the car system once again.
What is going wrong? Is there a solution available? Is there a bug in the interface? Is there someone else who has the same problems?

[mgowake]

Same thing... the whole interface pretty much sucks.

[Dave317]

Same problem. I use an Android phone but due to the lousy track record of BMW withy Android I bought an IPod touch 5 to leave in the car loaded with offline music. On first connection the app more or less works. If I turn the car off and on and then go into Spotify, the top 4 buttons are greyed out and I can only continue with the current album or playlist. In other scenarios I lose (greyed out) all buttons, but this is less predictable to reproduce. Restarting the app on the Ipod fixes the problem but this is hardly the seamless integration that I specifically paid €300 for. These problems are in addition to the general unpredictability when switching between Spotify and other connected drive apps. I suspect this to be a ConnectedDrive issue as the problem occurs between other apps. For the record, I have a 2015 f34 with all BMW connected drive software up to date, iPOD 5 with IOS 8.1.3 and the latest Spotify app version.

[philiwilli]

Got the same problems here.

will try to update IOS to 8.2 but don`t think this will be the solution.

[Dave317]

Just tried 8.2 and no obvious improvement. Quick correction to my previous post, it's the top 3 menu items not top 4; playlist, browse and radio. In the hope that the developers monitor this forum 1) The browse button doesn't appear to do anything, there is a message to wait but eventually i give up and press back. 2) Succesful display of album art, track and artist seems to be pretty random, even between tracks on the same album. I'll check later tonight but i think it displays or not consistently per track, pointing to a bug in encoding algorythm of the data before it is sent to the car i.e. something like name too long or names with spaces. I'll see if i can spot some sort of trend. Maybe if we can debug the problem ourselves we will have more chance of a fix. I assume that our problems will not get much priority as we are a relatively small community.

[philiwilli]

I read in another thread that there may be some problems with concurrent apps which block the audio traffic.
I also have problems using Spotify via airplay. Everytime the iphone goes to lock screen the music stops.
Did somebody try to close all other apps instead of Spotify if it then works after reconnect to connected drive?

[klaus_hespert]

Thanks for all the input here. But the problem is still not solved, it is obviously a bug in the Spotify App. When the user switches back to Spotify, the messages from the BMW A4A Interface are not handled properly by Spotify. As a result of this, the car display is not updated correctly.
Only the initial connect to the App works fairly good, therefore it helps to restart the app before using it.
The only solution we have is to increase the pressure on Spotify, to make them fixing the bug(s). Therefore please go on posting this issue and make them aware that there are several users affected by this issue!
As BMW even shows the Spotify integration in the TV spots for the new 1 series, I have sent an email to the Munich based BMW App Center. I think BMW has more power to move Spotify to fix the bugs. Please do this as well. The more aware BMW gets that there are several users ( BMW customers!!!) affected, the faster we can expect a solution.
Thanks,
Klaus

[Dave317]

The Spotify update to 2.6.0 "appears" to have fixed my problem with the disabled buttons. There are no release notes with 2.6.0, only the message "Minor improvements". I guess this is Spotify speak for bug fixes, but without proper release notes it's not possible to determine if this is an intentional fix, or just coincidental.  It's too soon to say for definite that it is fixed for me as I have only had a couple of small commutes in which to test it, but I can definitely now plug into the USB with Spotify already running on the Ipod and the top three buttons do not get disabled. The buttons were consistenty disabled in this scenario on the previous version. I still have issues with album art, although up to now I have not seen the problem with the missing artist and track display. I played around a little with the album art issue this morning and noticed that if I listed by album then only the first one displayed the album cover, the rest of them had only the disk icon. If I played music from the top album then the art displayed, if I played music from any of the others then no art. I stopped and restarted Spotify, disconnected and restarted but each time only the top entry had the art. Only stopping and starting the car (i.e. rebooting the software) and then reconnecting Spotify cleared the problem, this time all art was displayed.  It appears that the data is cached on first connection and only a restart of the car software can flush this cache. Note that this album art corruption was while I was testing the disabled button isssue so I had conncected to the car with the Spotify app already running.This may never happen with a "clean" strart as described in your first post. I don't think the fact that it was only the first album is significant, I think it just gets corrupted at some point during the initital transfer, and each time it will occur somewhere else.

Not sure how much pressure we can put on BMW but I do think that this app integration is seen as a priority for them. BMW were even at the recent Apple Watch launch pushing their iRemote app as the first to be supported. It would be nice to think that the minor improvements in version 2.6.0 were actually BMW fixes.

Has anyone else tried the new version and able to confirm that at least the greyed out button problem has gone away? 

Dave

[jordy5]

Seems the last update fixed some of the issues. I also noticed that I can let it pair with Spotify through USB and then switch to another app or just turn the display off. The music continues playing afterwards and the spotify app in the BMW is still responding.

[br403]

Hi, I have the same issue. But I think this is not correct, because I´m not able to switch to the iOS player for my local music on my iPhone. I have to disconnect and start the music app on the phone. 

I tried Napster with the iOS integration, and this worked perfectly, switching from Napster to iPhone music app and back.

Spotify, please fix this!

[br403]

It looks like it is fixed with the new version 2.8. I can switch from my iOS music app to Spotify and back without issues.

[br403]

With Version 2.9, the issue is back. Spotify, what are you doing???

Edit: OK, I removed and reinstalled Spotify on the iPhone, and the problem is gone.

Edit2: It is still here...it works a while but it reappears. Spotify, please fix it!

[BrownySV]

Still happening for me 18 months later. Car is fully up to date, iOS is fully up to date and Spotify App is also the latest version. Just rubbish....switched to iPhone specifically to have this feature in the car.

Time to find something better that actually works.

[psinke1974]

I can confirm, that months later, the problem is still there.

Sometimes takes up to 10 minutes before any music starts, including dangerous fiddling with Spotify app while on the road and parts of the interface still not loading in the BMW app.

I'm currently thinking of switchign back to Apple Music, and if that works better, just to ditch Spotify. The curated playlists are better too with Apple Music, so it would be a win-win.

[nrjs_s]

BMW Connected + Spotify + iPhone is dangerous combination as of now on road. I just got BMW Connected on 2016 BMW with 6.8 inch iDrive unit.Both connected drive ans spotify are equally terrible. spotify disconnects every now and then and goes silent. Also it stops working when i try to switch to Navigation App.

[psinke1974]

Since the introduction of iOS 11 (which is, at the moment still beta) the problems worsened. In an act of despiration I tried to remove and reconnect my phone from the car. Now Spotify is gone altogether and I can't play bluetooth audio either. I think it's time to contact my BMW dealer.

[nrjs_s]

Well this got sorted out. Problem was with USB Cable length. I was using 2 meter USB Cable. It works fine with 1 m USB