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Comment by phab | Hacker News Reader

I think it's pretty astounding that a customer complaint thread has run to 17 pages, direct contact on twitter, a HN story and customers going to such extreme lengths as editing their binary...

... and not one engagement from Spotify themselves on the thread. Seems like pretty poor customer support to me.

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The Spotify desktop client had a bug where, every time you pressed "back", it would lose the scroll position on the previous page. It would show you the correct point, but when you tried to interact with it, it would jump back to the top of the page. It was incredibly frustrating if you were trying to browse through an artist's albums.

This is the kind of bug that should have been easily caught by automated regression testing. It wasn't. That should have been easily caught by a pre-release QA process. It wasn't. The kind that, if it it sneaked into a release, should have been triggered a rollback or a quick patch. It didn't.

Instead, they left this ugly bug in place for months. Despite dozens of complaints of their support forums, containing hundreds of posts. And throughout, I never saw a single official response from a Spotify employee. The only communication was hearsay through volunteer moderators, who said it was being "worked on", but with no suggestion of why it wasn't being fixed sooner, or when it actually would be.

Spotify push out updates to their client almost every few days, but it's clear their software development process is garbage, and that their developers are either unwilling, or unable to prioritise basic bug fixes. If I had to guess, I'd suggest that it's a combination of technical debt and bad processes inherited from their startup days, combined with a management focus on features that support monetisation goals rather than basic maintenance.

> If I had to guess, I'd suggest that it's a combination of technical debt and bad processes inherited from their startup days, combined with a management focus on features that support monetisation goals rather than basic maintenance.

I wish it was that. I'm not claiming to know, but AFAIR they've done at least two overhauls which I believe changed both dependencies, interface and logic, which suggests they had at least the opportunity to clean out any technical debt.

But for sure, something in the client development is broken. I remember reporting that bug too, as well as others.

If they did a big bang rewrite in a hurry they likely just swapped one kind of technical debt for another.

Each of their overhauls has been a massive failure. Spotify "1.0" didn't even have ctrl-f support for monthS!

> it's clear their software development process is garbage, and that their developers are either unwilling, or unable to prioritise basic bug fixes.

In my experience, when things are this bad, the prioritisation is being made outside of the development team. Working with a super buggy codebase is unpleasant, demoralising work. Developers don't do it by choice.

This issue has been driving me insane! I never went looking on the forums, assumed that my installation was buggy or something.

Just noticed, thanks to this comment, that it's FINALLY been fixed. Excellent

I just spent 3 weeks talking in circles about their Android app and buggy Bluetooth support. Even after telling them that I'm a software engineer and explaining the technicalities of the bug that was happening, I still got referred to the "Bluetooth setup" section of their guides with a copy / paste email. After several more emails it ended in "we'll email you when we have more info".

I started my Google play music subscription two days ago. Their customer support beyond pre-recorded rhetoric is abysmal.

Apple musics is very friendly, though I haven't talked to them about technical issues.

The app, at least on Android, is very immature, though.

Has a better Asian selection than Spotify, at least.

Was it that Spotify (even if closed) hijacks bluetooth "play" from another audio application that is currently open and active?

That annoyed me to no end as well. I had to get another app to forcifully intercept any play call and trigger a pre-defined application instead. Which is... not optimal. I'm glad this thread is on HN, bugs with Spotify clients not getting fixed for months/years have annoyed me since I signed up in 2008.

I've had the opposite: Google Play Music (which I don't use) hijacks bluetooth "play" from Spotify - or at least it does every time I accidentally update Play Music.

Agreed.

For a service I love dearly and have been using for 8 years, both their client applications and their support thereof has always been astoundingly lacking.

I've reported numerous bugs, and they almost always go unanswered for years, while some community elevated user will respond in a well-meaning but non-relevant answer, suggesting some run-of-the-mill IT tech solution, without any insight into the actual problem nor the Spotify tech.

I have rarely ever seen a Spotify rep taking client bugs seriously. Which is a shame.

But on that note: Has anyone tried Tomahawk? Or any other alternative client? I've been meaning to try something else but haven't gotten around to it.

The first reply on the top of that page is a classic

"Isn't installing Spotify in a regular HDD an option?"

Just completely ignore the problem and find a way to let you pretend it doesn't exist.

Haha!

I didn't even check, but that is indeed a very accurate synecdoche of their support forum at large. Good catch.

After reading this thread, I'm actually going to do just that. Not that I agree with the solution but it solves my issue at least

EDIT: Just tried to do so, and the spotify installer doesn't let you choose where to install.

A typical response here would be, "Have you tried just switching out your main hard drive to a non-SSD and making that the default install location? Good luck!"

You can set the location of the cache in advanced settings IIRC.

Thanks for pointing that out. Even ignoring the excessive writes, it'll be nice to have the cache take up space on my vast spinny drive rather than on my somewhat tight SSD.

The folder isn't as large as the IO usage makes it out to be. The entire PersistentCache directory is only ~104MB on my drive, even with >300GB written in the last few days

Good to know. I assumed it would not be dozens of GBs, but I assumed it might be one or two.

It is not the cache that causes the heavy IO. It is the SQLite DB at AppData\Local\Spotify\mercury.db AppData\Local\Spotify\mercury.db-wal

See http://blog.scaleprocess.net/spotify-heavy-io-problem/

Besides that, a lot of times setting a diff location for your cache does NOT move the cache. I had to use a symlink.

Also, they fixed this a couple months ago it seems. Page 22 of the comments in OP link.

I checked with some of my colleagues in work. My machine had 220GB written in 2 days. Another colleague had 300GB.

Go to Preferences -> Advanced Settings -> Change Cache Location

It's the VACUUM'ing of the SQLite database in that folder that's the problem. Moving that destination to your other drive should hopefully move the IO with it (I don't have a second drive to test with)

I think that often happens on support forums, because the power user volunteers trying to help others are too enthusiastic about the product. They have a deep bond to the product, that is strengthened by getting the (mental) reward of being recognized as an expert by answering a lot of questions on support forums. Therefore they will continue to use the product, even if it requires them to change their habits or to apply (costly) workarounds. Of course their answers will be written with this sentiment, so their suggestions might completely ignore the problem.

For Mac users: I wrote a bash script to create a Spotify app for you that is just electron wrapping the official Spotify web player. Just one command: https://jamesmcintyre.github.io/spotify-electron-client/

I am a participant in one 45+ page thread that has spanned two years (client failures when using the iOS app with CarPlay). Several participants have posted exact steps to reproduce, including model and firmware numbers and yet there was one response, two years ago, from Spotify, stating that they were aware of the issue and we should try version 3.X (we're on version 6.X now).

It's so frustrating and totally avoidable on their part (just a check-in saying "we're still not sure what the cause is but we are looking at it" would make such a difference)

I've had a similar poor customer support.

They constantly kept redirecting me to their forums or to their FAQ's when my payment wasn't going through.

Finally I raised a support request and awaited their reply. That was a few months ago. Since I didn't hear back from them I gave my money to Google play music (even though I'm not a fan of the google play UI or the app).

How did you transfer all you saved songs, and playlists?

Also, how is music discovery there? Spotify is crazy good with their discover weekly feature.

The discover weekly is sponsored content.

EDIT I am interested are you downvoting because you (1) think I am wrong, or (2) don't like that it contains adverts, or (3) don't mind it containing adverts and think that this is irrelevant?

I found some content[1] on that, but I don't think it affects paying subscribers.

[1] http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/spotify-will-now-let-b...

Some of the playlist may be, but I'm pretty sure Elvis Costello, Paul Mccartney's Wings and Dâm-Funk don't need Spotify marketing.

I've used an iOS app called Stamp (paid for) to transfer my stuff to Apple Music. There is a desktop version as well.

Apple Music's discovery is awful (although I guess it doesn't know me as well as Spotify does)

When the value your offering provides, which in Spotify's case is a ridiculous amount of music for a few bucks a month, most customers will forgive less than perfect software.

Obviously HN has a techie lean, and we dislike "bad" software but in the real world this matters little to 90+% of Spotify's customer base I'm sure.

This is a recurring, continuous pattern with Spotify. They don't care about artists, customers, or even record labels. Their dev process is awful. They never communicate. They push through awful UI redesigns (we just got one the other day, and it's just lots and lots of white space at the bottom of the page). Their customer support is terrible. AND they're screwing over artists who make less than a penny per play.

And despite all this, I am still using their service. None of the competitors have what I want/need.

And what is up with the issue? It's marked as "Closed" without any interaction from Spotify?

Was it closed as Fixed? Duplicate? Wontfix?

Apparently they have released new version with a fix to this issue. you should check whether it updates to 10.0.42

Probably at this point it's time to vote with the wallet and let them know why.

+1, I've cancelled my subscription and moved to Play Music.

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