Description

Let me explain my situation. I have a 500MB data plan, which is easily used up. So to conserve data I either listen to spotify on my iPhone over WLAN or I create offline playlists. I also have the 'Synch over 3G' flag set to 'off'.

In both cases (WLAN or offline playlist) I would expect the following: The spotify client does not send or receive a whole lot of data over 3G. In case of offline playlists no data needs to be sent, in case of a WLAN connection 3G is not needed. All the same spotify usually sends and receives tons of data over 3G. I am talking 100+ MB within hours! How is this possible? This can basically eat up the entire months dataplan within hours.

I tested this quite a bit. It has nothing to do with audio scrobbling, as even if I turn this off, the data is still used. And in any case, scrobbling should not use more than a couple of KB per song. I also do not send data to facebook, nor are push notifications turned on. I also made sure that the culprit really is Spotify, so this cannot be blamed on some other app.

For the last couple of months I usually turned off my cellular data whenever I listen to spotify. This of course works but is actually extremely annoying and every once in a while I forget. Why is the iOS Spotify client not able to get its connections straight? Never use 2G/3G for songs unless the according flag is set to on.

A more detailed description, using numbered steps

1. Turn off synching over 2G/3G, as well as scrobbling, facebook posting etc.

2. Connect to WLAN

3. Check 3G data count

4. Listen to music. Either an offline playlist or music from spotify servers for some time

5. Check 3G data count again

What I expected to happen

No or almost no data should be sent over 3G.

What actually happened

In a couple of hours 100+ MB were used.

My iPad/iPhone model

iPhone 4

Device’s Operating System

iOS 6.0 (10A403)

Is your device jailbroken?

No

Approximately how many playlists do you have?

40 - 50, about 20 synched for offline use

My mobile Spotify version

0.5.9.10, spotify core 0.7.1.6114