I use Spotify on a variety of devices (Windows 10 PC, Pixel 3 Android phone, Echo Dot, very occasionally PS5), and until recently, it's worked well that I've been able to control what's playing on one device with the app on another. I can tell Alexa to play Spotify on the Dot speaker but then pick songs on my phone, or I can be listening on my PC then switch it over to my phone and Bluetooth earbuds as I'm heading out the door. However, recently, this whole feature has been garbage.

At least half the time I open the Android app when music is playing on my Echo Dot, it doesn't show that it's playing anywhere else, and if I try to play a song, it just starts playing from my phone speaker while the music continues on the Dot. Just now, I tried to switch from my PC to the Dot because I was about to head into the kitchen and start making some food, and even though it shows the Dot in my list of devices, it does nothing when I click it. The music just keeps playing on my PC. So I decided to see if it was just the Dot or if it was Spotify, so I tried to switch it to my phone. When clicking my phone in the list of devices, it stopped playing the music on my PC and showed that it was playing on my phone, but looking at the app on my phone, nothing was going on. It wasn't playing music there or showing that my PC was playing. So I clicked back to "this computer" on my PC, and it showed that it was playing on my PC, but no music was actually playing, and when I clicked the puase/play button, it said that Spotify can't play that song now (even though it had just been playing it). And my phone app still shows that Spotify isn't playing anywhere else. Nothing would play until I went to a completely different playlist and started playing that.

This is infuriating. I pay for a subscription so I can listen to what I want seamlessly wherever I am, but I'm having to constantly stop and open the app and try to get it to play, or close the app and relaunch it. I just want to listen to the music I want without all this hassle. This combined with my previous topic of an incredibly awful homepage are making me seriously reconsider my subscription, since it seems like you don't listen to users at all.