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Comment by djtango | Hacker News Reader

I recently came back from a road trip in New Zealand - a lot of their countryside has little to no cell coverage. Combined with roaming (which seems to add an additional layer of slowness) and boy did it suck to try to use a lot of the web.

Also if any spotify PMs are here, please review the Offline UX. Offline is pretty much one of the most critical premium features but actually trying to use the app offline really sucks in so many ways

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Offline is still miles and miles better than patchy Internet. If spotify thinks you have Internet it calls the server to ask for the contents of every context menu, waiting for a response for seconds before sometimes giving up showing a menu and sometimes falling back to what would have been instant if it was in offline mode. I really loathe their player.

Not only that, there are many apps with no online aspect to them that have facebook sdk or some other spyware that does a blocking call on app startup and the app won't start without it succeeding, unless you are completely offline.

Especially annoying when one is using dns based filtering.

This was one of the major reasons I left Spotify. Apple Music handles this much more gracefully.

Hmm, this would also imply they would need more infrastructure at their side when they could just maybe use cached values stored locally.

I get irritated by this too. When it happens I put my phone on airplane mode to force Spotify to show the offline ui.

Yeah, me too.

And vow to someday get around to finding a different music solution.

> Also if any spotify PMs are here, please review the Offline UX. Offline is pretty much one of the most critical premium features but actually trying to use the app offline really sucks in so many ways

Also, Spotify (at least on iOS) seems to have fallen into the trap of thinking there is only "Online" and "Offline", so when you're in-between (really high latency, or really lossy connection), Spotify thinks it's online when it really should be thinking it's offline.

But to be fair, this is a really common issue and Spotify is in no way alone in failing on this, hard to come up with the right threshold I bet.

I've noticed BBC Sounds has the opposite problem. If you were offline and then get a connection it still thinks you're offline. Refreshing does nothing. You need to restart the app to get online.

I live in London which typically gets great signal everywhere. Except in the Underground network, where they're rolling out 5G but it's not there yet.

Please Spotify, why do I need to wait 30 seconds for the app to load anything when I don't have signal? All I want to do is keep listening to a podcast I downloaded.

i will never understand what all the people on the tube are doing on their phones with no internet, do they have the entirety of youtube bufferred XD?

> do they have the entirety of youtube bufferred XD?

Well, with Youtube Premium you can actually download videos in advance and watch them on the go w/o Internet access required.

> Well, with Youtube Premium you can actually download videos in advance and watch them on the go w/o Internet access required.

It will even download videos in the background it thinks you will enjoy, so you don't even need to manage anything.

Re: Spotify

So much agree here, the offline mode is so beyond being annoying so I even started building my own iOS offline first music app.

> my own iOS offline first music app

Sadly ironic that apple used to sell this, in the shape of an ipod!

I hold on to mine, it is perfect in every way that a phone is terrible.

It is tiny and 100% offline, just what I need.

Wait... iOS doesn't have an offline music app anymore either? Google replaced the "Play Music" app (which could also play offline music files) with "Youtube Music" a few years ago (not sure if that works with offline files, I switched to a third party app), but I thought iOS still had one (precisely because they used to sell the iPods, specifically the iPod touch which was more or less an iPhone lacking the phone part)?

It does. You can download playlists on Apple Music (or even use your own files with it, a rarity in the post-cloud world).

Maybe OP was talking specifically about the behaviour of Spotify?

To be honest the offline support of Apple Music even though exists, is on par with Spotify. It will bug you about “turn on wifi, you’re offline”, ask you to provide or update payment information, fail at synchronisation time to time with music purchased on iTunes, and overall work unreliably when you just want to listen to some songs you’ve copied from your physical CD’s. Like the whole thing trying hard to push you to use their subscription service.

I’ve never had a problem with Apple Music offline. It works great.

i think they just need a more aggressive timeout value to fallback to offline mode. i wonder where their engineering made it too complicated to weigh out these scenarios.

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