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Several Spotify users on Android are facing playback and notifications-related issues following a recent update. Complaints are scattered across Reddit and Spotify’s community forum from several users detailing the concerns.
The folks at 9to5Google also experienced some of these issues with the Spotify Android app. One of the primary complaints is the disappearance of the playback bar within the app. This means the app cannot recognize the song that’s currently playing.
To make matters worse, the Android OS cannot recognize the audio from the app either. In some instances, audio can overlap with other sources, such as YouTube. While Spotify hasn’t specified the root of the problem, most of the complaints stem from Android 12 users, so it’s likely a compatibility issue.
Spotify is likely to issue an app update soon
Moreover, most of the affected users appear to be using either Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel phones. There have also been incidents of a few OnePlus devices facing playback issues on Spotify.
These problems appear to be impacting users of Spotify for Android version 8.7.20.1261. It is usually recommended to get an older version of the app to fix the bugs. However, Spotify makes it increasingly difficult for users who want to manually sideload an older version of the app. So the safer bet is to wait for Spotify to issue a fresh update for these newly discovered bugs. A music streaming service is relatively useless without basic controls, so we hope Spotify takes this concern seriously.
Spotify renamed its Greenrooms App
In related news, Spotify recently renamed the Greenroom app into Spotify Live while also making it available within the standalone Spotify app. Existing users of Greenroom had to update the app for the changes to take effect.
Meanwhile, Spotify Live will continue to exist. While users can listen to live shows from their favorite creators from the Spotify app, they will require the Spotify Live app to interact with the creators in real-time.
The company has changed its programming budget significantly since pivoting towards Clubhouse-style live audio/text chat sessions. Meta, Twitter, and Amazon, also have their versions of Clubhouse with varying degrees of functionality. Given that Spotify is one of the biggest names in audio streaming today, the emergence of Greenroom/Spotify Live was hardly surprising.