As if there weren’t enough ploys by Tim Cook to get you to switch to Apple Music they’ve gone and purposely sabotaged Spotify on Apple Watches with watchOS 9! Can you believe that?… Oh it’s a bug. Well I bet Tim would do it if he could, but let’s take a look.
Any Apple Watch users who also stream music from Spotify may want to hold off on updating to watchOS 9, there’s a completely app-breaking bug going on that stops streaming in its tracks.
Spotify has been notifying its users by sending out emails warning of this watchOS 9 bug after the update’s release on Monday:
Apple WatchOS 9 introduced a bug that causes Spotify streaming on the Apple Watch to stop working. We urge Spotify Apple Watch users not to install the WatchOS 9 update until Apple has implemented a fix for the issue. Users who are already affected can instead download their content to their Apple Watch and listen offline or stream from their phones.
Spotify
According to users who’ve spoken out on the matter, if you’re streaming Spotify from you Apple Watch the audio will cut out after around 60 seconds of playback whilst the progress bar for the song continues to move. This issue is occurring on both Wi-Fi and cellular models of Apple Watch, though curiously enough does not affect media downloaded to the Apple Watch itself – only streaming.
Apple’s first watchOS 9.1 beta recently went out to developers on Wednesday and per some unverified reports the Spotify bug is fixed, though Apple does not directly mention the issue in release notes.
I guess it’s another instance of “wait and see”. We need more devs who are aware of this bug to put watchOS 9.1 beta to the test, or we need Apple to acknowledge the issue and help issue a fix. Either way it’s a bummer for any Spotify users out there.
For real though, Apple Music is pretty good. Tim Cook did not pay me to say that I swear.
