Certain open.spotify.com links break the app semi-permanently

[veil-fish]

Plan: Premium

Device: iPhone 12

Operating System: iOS 14.x

I've noticed that whenever someone sends me an open.spotify.com link to an album that is not available for streaming in my country and I open the app via the link, the app ends up in a very broken and unusable state. Basically, the Spotify app just starts switching away to Mobile Safari by opening an album URL immediately every time I open the app. Why? I don't know. It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it knows no pity or remorse, it just has to be reinstalled. This is pretty annoying since I don't know whether the album is available on Spotify for me before clicking the link. Is there any way to kick the app from this weird state without reinstalling? Is this a bug that perhaps should be fixed?

[MafeG]

Hi @veil-fish,

Thank you for posting this on the Community!

The behavior that you describe is odd. Since you've already reinstalled the app multiple times, please run a clean reinstall, as this one is more thorough than a regular one and can be helpful to get rid of any cache that might be causing trouble. Then try to open some links again. 

If the issue persists, please send us a video showing how it happens. This will help us investigate further.

We'll keep an eye out for your reply. 

[veil-fish]

Hi.

Thanks for your reply.

I think I've figured out what causes this behavior but the problem has just went away in the meantime, though.

URLs that trigger the issue are not actually linking to music albums; these are podcasts and episode pages. Since the Spotify podcast library isn't enabled in Russia yet, the app attempts to parse the URL and display the podcast, fails to do that, then decides to send the user back to the web page instead. I think that's the intended behavior. Problem is, the app also remembers it was supposed to display a specific podcast (or an episode) so it attempts and fails to display it every time on launch.

Podcast links seem to redirect to the Spotify main page today without trying to open the app, though.

[Alex]

Hey @veil-fish,

Thanks for the info you've gathered.

This seems logical, as Podcasts are not yet available in Russia.

We've passed this info on to the right teams at Spotify 🙂

Cheers.