[jamestanderson]

It's really cool to see offline support done well. It can be very frustrating when it's done poorly, or not offered at all.

One of my biggest gripes with the Spotify app is the poor offline support, at least in my experience on Android. I have the bulk of my library downloaded for offline listening, so when I have a spotty network connection like when I'm on the Subway, I'd expect that I can still easily access at least my downloaded songs. Not the case. Spotify, it seems, won't use its local cache until it's thoroughly convinced you're offline, which may take several minutes of waiting for requests to time out. Once Spotify is convinced I'm offline, my downloaded songs will then finally load normally.

My guess is that instead of doing it the way the Kinopio does - by reading from the local cache before fetching the remote data - Spotify does it the other way around.

Anyway, nicely done!

[paxys]

Yeah, the only way to get Spotify to work well offline is to manually set your phone to airplane mode. Otherwise it will endlessly try and fetch everything over the internet despite it being fully cached.

[JamesSwift]

I ran into this all the time when trying to listen while mowing my lawn and going into/out-of wifi range. Very frustrating UX.

[pketh]

lately, I've been using zotify to download album mp3s from spotify and listen to them in doppler for mac/ios. It's been amazing to not have to use spotify to use spotify

[latentcall]

I thought Spotify used to have an “offline mode” toggle in the settings a long time ago. Is that no longer the case?

[jamestanderson]

Huh, I never knew about this! It looks like it's still around. I'll try that next time. Thanks for the tip!