Spotify on a BMW
18/09/20 14:22 Filed in: Cars
Spotify on my BMW has been unreliable…and then just stopped working. Here's a workaround.
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A while ago I spent quite a while working out why Spotify was unreliable on my late 2019 M2C. It just wouldn't always show up. You could still listen to music from it you just couldn't control it from iDrive. Infuriating. Anyway, I eventually got it reliable. Then what happens…Spotify issue an update which means it doesn't work AT ALL. I won't get into how crap the integration is with Android devices (I've started using an old iPhone for CarPlay), but fortunately there is a way to resolve the issue.
So, what issue am I talking about? Two issues, namely:
- Spotify showing up on iDrive is unreliable. It works sometimes.
- Spotify then stops working AT ALL, ever.
There's two different fixes here, but you need to apply the below fix before doing what I suggest in my video. The video is down below. These changes have made it so that Spotify connects 9 times out of 10, which is way better than 0 out of 10. The trick here is that later versions of the Spotify app simply remove this capability, so you have to downgrade to a previous version, and you have to turn off Auto-updates in the Google Play store. Just to be clear, I'm not that familiar with Android - I struggle to get that interested in mobiles, they seem to have stagnated and they all seem to do the same thing - if somebody knows a way of being able to leave on auto-updates while not updating a specific app, I'm all ears.
So, what do you do. You do this:
Uninstall Spotify from your phone. Yes, you'll need to re-download all your music again.
Make sure you have the BMW Connect App installed.
Turn off auto-updates in the Google Play Store.
Now, go grab a previous version of the Spotify app from here:
https://spotify.en.uptodown.com/android/versions
I've been using version 8.5.66.1002. Copy this to your phone and install that (this is known as side-loading, see here for some guidance).
You can now start Spotify & the connected app and hopefully your Spotify should be more reliable…and actually connect. Downside is now and again you have to go in to the Google Play store and update your apps…..but not Spotify.
Very irritating. Anyway, the original video is below.
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