Disabling wifi & data works, but just being without an active connection - such as when underground or something - and wanting to play some music or a podcast that is on the device already just doesn't seem to occur to spotify as a valid scenario.
Once I get that "No internet connection available" message, the amount of coaxing to get it to play locally saved music is insane. Usually it is some combo of app restarts, toggling "offline mode", and toggling airplane mode on my phone that will eventually get it to play.
Spotify. Please figure out the surely 5 lines of code that would fix this. I'm sure this bug even predates my finding of it.
Spent 10 seconds waiting for it to go away, followed by a few more just to dismiss it (you can't), just to have to go all the way into settings and back out just to play my music.
Wild.
Over the years, it has been sad to watch reliability and latency regress to the web-age mean (mediocre and so high as to frequently complicate interaction).
Oh, you want to start playing multiple albums from a queue, respecting the order? Can't just do that from the app startup, you have to start playing something, enqueue the albums, and then skip whatever is playing.
I think that one is an Android issue. I have a handful of media apps, and with both bluetooth and wired headphones, the result of hitting the play/pause button is often completely random.
* If something is playing, sometimes hitting the button will pause it, other times it will start some other app playing. (This has the side-effect of pausing the first thing, but is literally never what I wanted.)
* If I just paused something 5 seconds ago, sometimes the play button will resume that, other times it will start something I was listening to an hour or more ago.
* Also, occasionally, it just refuses to respond to the button at all. I used to think this was just my earbuds being buggy and not recognizing my taps, but I got a different pair that makes a ding sound when sending the play/pause command, so now I know when it's the earbuds vs the phone that's being a dick.
I think the problem started around Android 10 or 11. Before that, starting one media thing would boot out the previous one. Now they just hang around like zombies waiting to hi-jack your play/pause commands.
Smart AudioBooks Player is by far the best behaved of the bunch. I think it's partially because it's entirely offline, and partially because it's not trying to sell me anything. It's so much better that I will sometimes extract my audiobooks from other platforms (Audible, Chirp, Libro.fm, etc.), reformat/de-DRM as necessary, and then move them over to SABP to actually listen to them.
Plexamp is probably second best. I find the UI a little confusing, but it mostly just does what I want when I want to listen to my music.
In the past, I used Podcast Addict to listen to a lot of podcasts. It was pretty well behaved also. But I got tired of all the adds and filler in the podcasts themselves and mostly switched over to audiobooks. When I do want to listen to a podcast, I've found that, with sponsorblock, youtube is actually the least annoying option these days But even with that I no longer consistently listen to any podcasts.
How could it be? They make an intelligence test with 5 seconds to solve linear systems!
Despite what the quote in the article from a spotify rep says, the desktop app continued to burn massive amounts of write into hard drives for quite a while. From what I saw in the year or so after, the "fix" seemed to throttle the pointless write frequency based on disk IO. Not so bad if you were trudging along on platters. If your SSD was fast/expensive enough it could top a TB of write in 24 hours.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/for-f...
It would be refreshing to hear some Product Manager say "Yea, that feature is terrible and anti-user, but it juices our MAU metrics which means huge bonus for me!"
"Hey! Here's a notification for a new podcast! Want to click on it and see the episode details? Fuck you, here is the Spotify home screen instead."
"Yeah, you know those 278 songs you have stored locally? I'm going to re-download the whole lot just because I feel like it."
"Oh, you've clicked on a link to a playlist? Extra fuck you, here's the Spotify home screen, search for it yourself."
"Oh, you were just playing a podcast in a different app, paused it by your headphones, and then press play again? Well fuck that podcast app I'm taking over."
Honestly, it's a complete clown show and the only thing going for it is the licensing of so much music.