Continue to play Liked Songs Alphabetically after closing and reopening the app on iPhone

[kylegoodin]

Premium Family

Premium

USA

iPhone 13 Pro Max

iOS 15.6.1

I play my liked songs alphabetically A-Z. If I close out of the app on my iPhone, when I get back on the app and play music again, it will remember the last song I was playing, and a fairly accurate timestamp of when I stopped playing that song.

However, when the song ends, the next song that it plays will not be the next song alphabetically in my liked songs, it will be some other random song from my liked songs. But I have noticed that after it plays the random song, the songs it plays after that are songs that were added immediately before. So it starts playing my liked songs sorted by Recently Added, instead of sorting it by Title like I was doing before I closed the app.

Which means any time I close the app, I have to navigate to my Liked Songs, scroll through them all and click on the one that I was playing before I closed the app, in order to get the app to start playing my Liked Songs alphabetically at the same spot I was playing before I closed the app.

Please fix this issue, it has to be such an easy thing to fix, and it would make my user experience, as well as many others, so much better.

To test this: Open Spotify on iPhone, go to Liked Songs, make sure it is sorted by Title, and Shuffle is not on. Click on a song, you can skip a few songs to make sure it is actually playing alphabetically. On iPhone, open the app switcher, and close out of Spotify. Reopen the app. It will remember the song you were playing and a general idea of the timestamp you stopped playing. But if you let the song end, or skip the song, it will not continue to play your Liked Songs in Alphabetical order(sorted by Title).

It would be really great if someone could look into this and at least give me a response. If you've experienced this issue as a user and want it fixed, please comment expressing interest in getting this issue fixed. Thank you so much!

[pson]

Plan

Premium

Country

Sweden

Device

Motorola Edge 20 Pro

Operating System

Android 11

Spotify 8.7.6.1083 but issue is older

My Question or Issue

Since the built in random play is a joke I've switched to sorting my "Liked Songs' in alphabetical order instead and just let it play.

But it seems that Spotify don't like this because if I stop listening, use my phone for something else and a bit later open Spotify again and resumes play of the song that was playing it plays as expected. What happens after that song is done though isn't expected, the queue is filled with Spotifys version of random songs instead of what song that's comes next alphabetically.

No, Spotify does not have background restrictions.

No, I don't press that awful "random" play button.

Yes, I have turned off every possible setting for autoplay this and autoplay that.

First I thought this was because of my old and outdated phone but I just got a new one and the behavior is still the same.

So is this yet another one of Spotifys super cool new feature that no one has asked for or is this a proper bug? Have no hope in getting it fixed either way but would be nice to know. And if anyone has a work-around since that's the way things usually is solved until som dev is bored and remove/add something that breaks the work-around too.

[Alex]

Hey @pson,

Thanks for reporting this in the Community!

We'll look into it 🙂

When you come back to the app and play the last played song, can you check if the songs that follow are in the same order as if sorted by Date Added?

Looking forward to your reply.

[pson]

Nope, just as I wrote, they are in Spotify's so called random order. 

[Eni]

Hey @pson, 

Thanks for letting us know.

Would you mind sending us a screen recording of the issue happening so we can take a closer look? You can attach it to your next response by using the Insert Video option in the post editor or upload it to a different platform and send us the link to it. We'd like to investigate this further.

We'll be waiting for your reply.

[pson]

Sorry, no idea how to do that. And how would that help you understand it better? It would show nothing that I haven't already described and isn't exactly rocket science involved when replicating it.

Sort Liked Songs by title

Pick a tune and listen on a few

Pause

Wait some time (haven't found a minimum)

Resume play

Next song will be a Spotify-random one instead of the next in line if sorting by title

[Eni]

Hi there @pson,

We want to thank you for your report on this.

The right folks at Spotify are aware of this issue and are currently looking into it 🙂

We recommend keeping your app up to date, not to miss any updates.

If you need a hand with anything else, the Community is here for you.

[pson]

So you finally fixed it but then managed to "unfix" it so maybe it was just a coincidence.

Anyhow....

It's back and the behavior is just like before.

Looking forward to a prompt and permanent fix. 

[Elena]

Hey @pson,

Thanks for bringing this up.

This is still being looked at and the teams are working on a fix. Could you tell us which Spotify version are you currently using?

Also check if the app on your phone requires an update.

Keep us posted,

Cheers!

[pson]

OK, so then you accidentally fixed it earlier because it was when I updated
to 8.7.26.901 (might have skipped a version or two) yesterday it came back.
No new update to install as of today.

[pson]

And now you've managed to make it even worse. Sometimes a quick pause under a minute is all that's needed to trigger it.

So pleas just be honest.

If you really had someone trying to fix this it would've been fixed by now, especially since you fixed it some versions ago (unintentionally?) so say it as it is, this will not be fixed and is working as you want it to, so I don't need to wait for something that'll never happen. 

Version 8.7.38.664

[pson]

This is driving me mad, how far are you in your work on a fix? 

[Ven3]

same here, I'm going mad with this

[AlejaR]

Hey @kylegoodin,

Thanks for posting on the Community and welcome 🙂

In this case, we'd like to gather as much info as possible. Can you send us a video recording of this behavior? Please attach the videos in your next reply in mp4 format, or you can also upload them to YouTube or Google drive and make them public, so we can visualize them.

On another note can you let us know the exact Spotify version you have installed on you mobile device?

Keep us in the loop!

[kylegoodin]

Hey @AlejaR,

Thank you for responding!

I had tried to attach the file of my screen recording(too large) and post the link to a Google Drive file to my initial post and it wasn't letting me. So trying again with the Google Drive link, hoping it works this time.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qw6TZ1unr8l9QGL77nZhB7tlbtGtpZf9/view?usp=sharing

Spotify Version: 8.7.66.438

New iPhone iOS Version: 16.0 (20A362)

The iPhone app randomly changes to playing in order filtered by Recently added after closing and reopening it. What is weird is if I am playing songs in the A's, after reopening, it plays the songs I most recently added. If I am playing songs in the Z's, after reopening, it plays the songs I added the longest ago.

I had contacted support about this issue and they had me sign in with a test account and I was having the same issue there. And I know others who experience the issue as well, so it's not anything with my account. The issue doesn't happen when I listen on my MacBook Pro, but I mostly listen on my phone, so I would love if this could be fixed.

If you need anything more from me, just let me know. Thank you!

[Dian]

Hey @kylegoodin,

Thanks for the screen recording.

One more thing - could you reproduce the issue on a different phone? Just to be sure, have you enabled the background app refresh for Spotify? Here is how to do it. 

Keep us posted,

Cheers!

[kylegoodin]

Hey @Dian,

I have had background app refresh on throughout my attempts. I tried on two other phones that had background app refresh on as well and was experiencing the same issue.

Have you tried reproducing the issue yourself? I’ve mentioned this to others and I’ve yet to come across someone that doesn’t experience the issue.

[Yordan]

Hi @kylegoodin!

Some of us were able to reproduce this behavior, so we've gone ahead and reported it to our tech folks who'll investigate further. We'll keep you posted here as soon as there is any new information to share, so stay tuned! In the meantime, make sure to always keep the app up to date.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Cheers!

[Novy]

Hi @kylegoodin,

Would you mind letting us know if you're still experiencing this issue? 

We'll be on the lookout 🙂

[kylegoodin]

I am absolutely still experiencing this issue.